Change We Can Perceive In

The liberal blogosphere has gone decidedly bi-polar in the Great Transition. On one side are the believers, betrothed to an image they conjured between the lines of conventional centrism, a group that is beginning to think that President-elect Obama is going to leave them waiting at the altar. They wait for their progressive swain among a growing sea of centrist appointments, foreign policy hawks, and leaked favorites from the last Democratic administration.

On the other side are the cynical pragmatists - just as personally progressive as their heartsick brethren - but decidedly less ambitious in their perception of the Obama promise; this latter group tends to know their Democratic Presidential history and is likely to own a copy of Dennis Perrin's brilliant and instructive Savage Mules.

In the end, the history-reading cynics (and count me as a card-carrier) may end up happier with President Obama.

One of the lasting mysteries of the historic election cycle just concluded was the mass migration of Democratic liberals to Obama, the careful centrist Senator out of the old-school clubhouse organization of Chicago, Illinois. There were serious progressive mainstream (non-Kucinich) choices in the pack: John Edwards and Hillary Clinton stood to Obama's left on domestic policy, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson took their place on international issues.

 On any given issue - from Iraq to healthcare to tax policy - Obama always had a major rival on his left. Even when the race narrowed to a long a bitter slog with Clinton, Obama remained to the right of the New Yorker on key issues like national healthcare reform. Yet it was Obama who had a monopoly on iconic cover stories in The Nation, Obama who excited the pacifist anti-war Democrats, Obama who inspired allusions to the famed socialist organizer Saul Alinsky.

Part of it was his evident political mojo, part of it was his Iraq stance compared to Clinton's, and part of it was a strong remnant of 90s era anti-Clinton bias among progressives. But almost none of it was policy or specific promises. Says Glenn Greenwald, leader of the cynical pragmatists:

So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes.  But it wasn't Obama who misled them.  It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered. 

Now that Obama is the President-elect after a brilliant and highly-disciplined campaign, there is a manic near-panic among the believers about his cabinet and White House staff picks - which are dominated by experienced, conventional, mostly centrist politicians and technocrats...and which pretty much fulfill the candidate's explicit promise to build a competent, functioning, non-ideological government after the long Bush nightmare. Over at The Nation, Chris Hayes is not happy - promises, it seems, were perceived:

Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one. Remember this is the movement that was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care.

And he's not alone. Chris Bowers dislikes the Obama team. And this post on Alternet by FDL regular bmz asks whether "Barack Obama is screwing the netroots?" And at The Progressive last week, Matthew Rothschild asked angrily: "When is Obama going to appoint someone who reflects the progressive base that brought him to the White House?"

Yet, Obama's moves so far are exactly what he promised - "change" was regime change, a new style, and the involvement of more Americans in the promise of the republic. The coalition government - even the "team of rivals" - were explicit promises; you didn't need to somehow perceive them. Moreover, Rothschild's complaint belies a problem with perception: Obama certainly had the progressive base, but he made it no promises whatsoever. As Jane Hamsher says, her expectations fully adjusted for inflation:

Many people managed to convince themselves that Obama was a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool progressive at some point during the primaries.  For no reason as far as I could tell -- his voting record in the Senate was pretty much identical to Hillary Clinton's, and the people he surrounded himself with weren't exactly "outsiders."  But in the midst of the pie fights, that hardly seemed worth dwelling on for the pointless vitriolic arguments it would have engendered.

And then there's Digby - yet another progressive voice who takes a more pragmatic view of the Obama policy promise:

Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything. So, we have the great symbolic victory of the first black president (and that's not nothing, by the way) who is also a bipartisan, centrist technocrat. Surprise. . . . Obama said repeatedly that he wasn't ideological, that he cared about "what works." I don't know why people didn't believe that. He's a technocrat who wants to "solve problems" and "change politics." The first may actually end up producing the kind of ideological shift liberals desire simply because of the dire set of circumstances greeting the new administration. (Hooray for the new depression!) The second was always an empty fantasy --- politics is just another word for human nature, and that hasn't changed since we were dancing around the fire outside our caves.

***

Nowhere did many progressives deceive themselves more than in foreign policy - and on no subject are they more outraged; in some cases, this is simply because of Obama's recruitment of  Clinton as Secretary of State. But it's also because  of a blind spot of longstanding on the left - a bit of self-deception that many Democrats indulge in every four years or so.

As far as I'm concerned, Dennis Perrin has contributed the masterwork in the scholarship on the Democrats' strange relationship with militarism. Savage Mules: Democrats and Endless War tackles the historic dichotomy: a hawkish left that occasionally tries to brand itself as spiritually opposed to war. Savage Mules is a brilliant rant, really - it traffics in hypocrisy and rides the wave of Perrin's evident anger and stylish writing. If somebody's pissed off about this, I'm glad it's Dennis, a gifted weaver of the tale. The book (short and pungent) is filled with episodes we know, from the hateful Andrew Jackson to the check-in tables at the YearlyKos convention, and neatly threaded with steel prose skewers that penetrate our gauzy images of FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and even (especially) the human rights warrior Jimmy Carter, "America's most underrated imperialist."

Perrin is that rare liberal of 2008: he opposes Obama, openly. Indeed, the iconography around the President-elect is an opposing polar force, driving Dennis to denounce hypocrisy and false left-wing optimism. I felt the sting a couple of weeks ago when celebrating the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as a no-nonsense chief of staff. "Oh, to be in a Gaza camp today," commented Dennis. "Imagine their excitement with this appointment!"

In Perrin's Democratic Party, the still-living myth of a JFK as the peace-loving president whose tragic murder led to a cruel and deeper involvement in Vietnam (the Oliver Stone hagiographic view) has inhabited, in turn, the personal life mythology as two successors: Bill Clinton and his famous snapshot at the White House of Camelot, and Barack Obama as the modern version of a young, handsome, masculine liberal ushering  in a new and optimistic era.

Bloggers wringing their hands over the imagined abandonment of an imagined liberalism should read Savage Mules:

American political life has always been a feeding frenzy of delusion, uplift, and fantasy. Things that ought to be, are, and become so depending on the number of people agreeing to a particular concept and the need for that concept to be True.

***

It seems clear that along with going "long and deep" - in Rahm Emanuel's words - on public policy, especially in rolling back some of Bush's structural conservatism in the Federal government, Barack Obama is banking on experience and pragmatism in his administration. The election is over, of course; and Obama will probably never call on the left to do again for him what it did in the winter of 2007-2008. He only faces one more election in his life (as an incumbent), and as Glenn Greenwald noted, liberals probably overrate their contribution to his victory:

It's impossible to quantify, but I think the vast majority of Obama supporters were perfectly clear-eyed about what he is and voted for him for the standard unremarkable reasons -- that they perceived him as better than the alternatives.  But there is no question that Obama has inspired among many Democrats a type of deep and intense loyalty that is personal to Obama rather than grounded in policy issues, that many see him as much more than a politician who will make good political decisions.

Still, the dismay seems to be growing. Some is the poisonous and personal (and often, sexist) dislike of Clinton. But of it seems to evidence the earnest quality of those who really, really expected something entirely different. In Mother Jones this week, Kevin Drum wrote about some of the open-mouthed progressive response to Obama's foreign policy and security team (as leaked thus far):

Obama never pretended to be some kind of Noam Chomsky acolyte. He's a mainstream liberal American president.

Well, replace "liberal" with "Democratic" and he might well be on to something.

Comments

[AnninCA]

I knew the anti-Obama folks were nuts when they worried over the coming Maxist state, although the bail-out fiascos are beginning to be completely ridiculous. The only people not "bailed" out will be small business people by the time this house of dominoes falls.

I knew the pro-Obama folks were nuts when they screamed over how Hillary was a "neo-con" and Obama was the true voice of the left. He made far, far too many obvious choices that indicated that he was no such messiah for their cause. I have no problem laughing at them today, since I thought they were very thick-headed during the primaries.

I'm just hoping Obama can accomplish something. Anything.

[Matt]

Fantastic and timely post, Tom. I'm looking forward to checking out Savage Mules.

[bruce]

A nice posting, Tom.

Obviously, it is way too early to judge the Obama "administration", since it won't take office for almost another two months. What happened to the idea of a political honeymoon?

Regarding what Hayes calls "dyed-in-the-wool progressives" in the Obama administration: I consider Bill Richardson to be a true progressive, as is Valerie Jarrett. We got a technocrat at Treasury and Hillary Clinton at State. I have high hopes for Holder as AG. So I'm not entirely sure what people are exorcized about: Hillary Clinton? Larry Summers?

Obama has since the election reiterated his promise to close Guantanamo, pull out of Iraq on a timetable, and end the various anti-human rights abuses such as torture. They are talking about a massive stimulus plan, $700 billion or so, which the left has to like. (I do.) What is the problem? That he won't raise taxes on the highest income bracket until 2011? (This has not been stated officially, but obviously they are floating it.) These are minor differences.

I will be very disappointed -- and it would be extremely stupid -- if they don't save the auto industry. Manufacturing workers are every bit as important as bankers and private equity guys. Even more so, I would argue. Our manufacturing base -- what is left of it -- is a national asset.

See Robert Reich for more on this point: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-citigroup-is-about-to-be-bailed-out.html

Personally, I would nationalize GM. A serious argument can be made for this, but I don't have the space or time to make it here.

[bruce]

Also too (Palin-speak): I just finished reading "Dreams from My Father." You can't read this book and not consider Obama a progressive. It is amazing that some of the musings from the book on race were not used more extensively by the Republicans during the campaign. He shows a deep and nuanced understanding of the effects of colonialism on Africa and Indonesia.

The two Presidents Obama is studying are Lincoln and FDR, the two most progressive Presidents in American history.

[bruce]

Melody Barnes, head of Obama's White House Domestic POlicy Office (appointed today) is a "dyed in the wool" progressive, VP of the Center for American Progress and former Ted Kennedy staffer.

Brad Delong thinks that Carol Romer, new head of the Council of Economic Advisors, is an "excellent choice."

I await Krugman's benediction on the economic team.

[Slappy]

Give me a break. This is still a country that reelected Bush. To think Obama would be smart to appoint some former commie to a cabinet post are insane. One step at a time. Maybe by 2014 the American flag will have a hammer and sickle on it, but not before then. Relax.

[julia]

It's not so much the true believers that bother me. It's the people who knew better and went along with it. Which, I realize, is clever and pragmatic, but too many of them turned on a dime at about FISA time and started gaslighting about what Obama said and didn't say.

Me, I think we got played by the DLC. On the other hand, the usual suspects in the middlebrow political press are just now realizing that the stick they used to beat Hillary with has a mind of its own and they're facing the popular presumption they built during the primary that disagreeing with him is tantamount to a vicious attack, which is satisfying to watch.

I'm most likely going to get a fair amount of stuff I'm not happy about. That's still a better outcome than I've gotten from most presidential elections.

[Neil M]

"Me, I think we got played by the DLC. On the other hand, the usual suspects in the middlebrow political press are just now realizing that the stick they used to beat Hillary with has a mind of its own and they're facing the popular presumption they built during the primary that disagreeing with him is tantamount to a vicious attack, which is satisfying to watch."

Julie, I'm not exactly clear what you mean by this. Can you explain?

[julia]

I mean that he was presented as the leftmost candidate, when it seems to me his views are pretty much exactly in line with what our pragmatic Centrists have been promoting.

OTOH, there was a report from a talk that nice conventionally wise Mr. Beinart gave to a bunch of students at Harvard about how much easier he'd be to beat than Hillary, and that really didn't work out for him.

[Brouhaha]

The phenomenon seems to be progressives believing the right's portrayal of Obama rather than the real-life one.

As for me, Obama's centrism and willingness to build an alliance from the Great Center was his main appeal, and squarely why I supported him over Hillary from day one.

The hard left had better temper their expectations or they'll find themselves as marginal and irrelevant to what's going on in this country as the hard right are right now.

The American people's vote for change was ultimately about change to the 51% governing style of the Bush Administration; not to a 51% majority the other way but from the old moderate consensus of days past when politicians could compromise and government actually functioned.

[Neil M]

"I mean that he was presented as the leftmost candidate, when it seems to me his views are pretty much exactly in line with what our pragmatic Centrists have been promoting."

Well, I suppose that there were those who "were presenting" Obama as some kind of raging leftie, but I think Obama presented his own stances on the issues fairly clearly. All one had to do was read a newspaper, watch a debate or browse to Obama's campaign Web site. I didn't do a superhuman job of research, but I was able to discover that Barack Obama was basically a center-left candidate. Others who voted for Obama knew or should have known the same.

[julia]

Well, I'd've tended to agree with you.

[Susie]

"It's not so much the true believers that bother me. It's the people who knew better and went along with it. Which, I realize, is clever and pragmatic, but too many of them turned on a dime at about FISA time and started gaslighting about what Obama said and didn't say.

I'm most likely going to get a fair amount of stuff I'm not happy about. That's still a better outcome than I've gotten from most presidential elections."

I agree, Julia. We could have done worse. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the spectacle of some Obama supporters apparently calling other Obama supporters a bunch of suckers who didn’t know enough to go to the candidate's website.

[Linkmeister]

I wish somebody would define "hard left" for me. It used to mean "card-carrying Commie," but I don't think there are any of those types left. Who exactly do the media think they're describing with that term?

[tdraicer]

>Now that Obama is the President-elect after a brilliant and highly-disciplined campaign

Gag. He won because of Bush and the September economic collapse (and if you are talking about the primaries he didn't win at all). He remains what he has always been, shallow, inexperienced, unprincipled, and the most Right-wing Democrat elected to the White House since 1856. The opportunity for real liberal change existed (thanks to W.) and the MSM and the Village hired Obama to shut the door on that opportunity. From their pov he is off to a great start. Why you are applauding their victory is another question.

[Neil M]

"He won because of Bush and the September economic collapse (and if you are talking about the primaries he didn't win at all)."

Hmm...I'd have thought his strong turnout efforts, a record-shattering fundraising apparatus, and Reaganesque communication skills played a part, but I guess that's just me.

[Robert1014]

"I wish somebody would define "hard left" for me. It used to mean "card-carrying Commie," but I don't think there are any of those types left. Who exactly do the media think they're describing with that term?"

"Hard left" is a catch-all pejorative used by the media and demagogues in government against anyone who proposes that we actually do something to remedy the gross economic inequities in our country; against those who demand we recognize and state clearly the nature of the great orgies of mass murder that typify not merely our current illegal military aggression abroad, but pretty much all our foreign entanglements going back decades, or frankly, nearly all our military actions internationally or domestically from the first days of our republic, and by recognizing this truth, demand a halt to all future such violent endeavors. It is a mutable phrase that means whatever it is can be perceived to mean sufficient to dismiss as "unserious" or "not pragmatic" or "extremist" or "angry" or "nuts" (or some confluence of those) anyone who offers a real critique of the fraud that is our long-standing self-depiction as the world's indispensable nation, as the world's "good guy."

You can be sure anyone who uses the term "hard left" to describe any person or cohort in America today is an enemy of "truth, justice, and the American Way," at least as that phrase is used by those who mean it, who believe in true justice, and of a government of, by and for the people.

[Robert1014]

"I wish somebody would define "hard left" for me. It used to mean "card-carrying Commie," but I don't think there are any of those types left. Who exactly do the media think they're describing with that term?"

"Hard left" is a catch-all pejorative used by the media and demagogues in government against anyone who proposes that we actually do something to remedy the gross economic inequities in our country; against those who demand we recognize and state clearly the nature of the great orgies of mass murder that typify not merely our current illegal military aggression abroad, but pretty much all our foreign entanglements going back decades, or frankly, nearly all our military actions internationally or domestically from the first days of our republic, and by recognizing this truth, demand a halt to all future such violent endeavors. It is a mutable phrase that means whatever it is can be perceived to mean sufficient to dismiss as "unserious" or "not pragmatic" or "extremist" or "angry" or "nuts" (or some confluence of those) anyone who offers a real critique of the fraud that is our long-standing self-depiction as the world's indispensable nation, as the world's "good guy."

You can be sure anyone who uses the term "hard left" to describe any person or cohort in America today is an enemy of "truth, justice, and the American Way," at least as that phrase is used by those who mean it, who believe in true justice, and of a government of, by and for the people.