I wanted to continue the discussion that began with this post by me and was continued by Ballgame and others over at Ian Welsh's site. In sum, I concurred with Nathan Newman's view that Obama has done a great deal to further the liberal cause over the last ten months, others suggested that I was a delusional sell out or worse.
I am writing further not to settle scores (well not entirely) but because I think that this is an incredibly important issue and one that is cosmic in its implications. I was pretty amazed at the quickness with which some of my fellow lefties are writing off Obama -- some, of course, had written him off in advance, so I guess they are feeling that peculiar form of schadenfreude that has been our specialty for oh, the last forty years or so. To these folks there is not a dimes worth of difference between Obama and Bush, one is simply a corporate whore with darker skin and smoother rhetoric. Hope lies only in the prospect that Obama will bring such disaster upon us that the 98% of people who are getting screwed over by Wall Street will wake up, join hands together, sing a chorus of the Internationale, hang the board of directors at Goldman, and proclaim the workers' state. Being a tepid, incrementalist cynic, I guess I'm not holding my breath -- that and maybe the fact that I've dealt with working class white people every day of my 25-year professional life and have a pretty good sense of how ready they are to man the barricades.
The question I keep raising with those who are advocating writing off Obama and the Democrats generally is what then? How do we then go about creating a country where the things we putatively care about can be achieved. The response to this is that I'm a deluded sell out if I think any of this can be done with Obama. Okay, I respond -- and how are you going to make it happen? Well, everything needs to crash and burn and then we will have our moment. (I always enjoy tragedy being turned into an abstraction.) Or, well we can work locally on progressive issues and bring about change one step at a time. Or we can use primary challenges and third party insurgencies to make the Democrats see the error of their ways, with heaven on earth soon to follow.
These responses demonstrate a kind of self-deluded onanism on an impressive scale, one that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics and power work in the United States.
The U.S. is the very opposite of a parliamentary democracy. The dispersal of power among the President, the two legislative branches, and the federal judiciary makes any grand programmatic approach to change difficult under the best of circumstances. The Senate, where a disciplined minority, representing a small fraction of the country's population, can thwart almost any initiative, is an enormous structural obstacle to progressive change. Only in circumstances when we have achieved super majorities in that body, from 1932-38 and 1964-66, have liberals been able to push through the defining programs of our limited social democracy. It is a bit odious to say that we need to not only re-elect the Blanche Lincolns and Ben Nelsons of the world, but that we need a few more (not to mention some pretty decent folks like Paul Hodes, Lee Fisher or Jennifer Brunner, and Robin Carnahan), but it's true. Third party challenges or insurgent primary campaigns from the left -- a popular suggestion from my true blue brothers -- would be completely self-defeating in states such as Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and Montana, the sources of our dilemma. (We could imitate the tea baggers success in NY-23.)
Well then -- we can always think purely and act locally. The only problem with this strategy is that it ignores the essential fact that truly meaningful social democratic policies like universal health care or labor law reform can only be achieved on a federal level. States and localities have no ability to engage in deficit spending and have limited revenue sources. Moreover, they have a tendency to be dragged into the kind of beggar thy neighbor strategies -- right to work laws, tax breaks for businesses to relocate, lower or non-existent income or corporate taxes -- that facilitate a race to the bottom, not bold progressive innovation. Yes, states can do things like enact marriage equality laws, but then they can't provide the full benefits of such recognition, e.g. equal tax treatment, entitlement to pensions and health benefits, etc.
We need programs with the sweep and durability of Social Security and Medicare, bold transforming change that create a decent life for all Americans. And the irony is, the way to get there is sometimes through the patient cultivation of electoral majorities encouraged by steady, rational, and pragmatic leadership. It's not all that psychologically satisfying, but then again, the truth seldom is.