Stoopid Stuff

The Path to Enacting a Progressive Agenda

Important breaking news. Barack Obama is not a liberal. Just in case you were disappointed by what you've seen from his administration so far, from Gates to Sotomayor to Dennis Ross, you need to recalibrate your thinking. Obama is a Clinton Democrat, a corporate friendly center-right populist with very strong international interventionist instincts. Additionally, he's been somewhat corrupted by the Bush/Cheney administration's Presidential power grab - it's very difficult for people with power to give up any power they already have - so we find Obama with more authoritarian tendencies than we had come to expect.

But consider the election of Barack Obama in context. Since 1980 we've had 20 years of Republican presidents. It was Bill Clinton who implemented the tactic of "triangulation", where he essentially moved to the right, co-opting the center while willingly sacrificing both the left- and right-wing bases. After 8 years of Bush/Cheney, there was a huge opportunity in the center once again, with only that hardcore 28% demanding ever more radical right-wing positions from their candidates. But in an election between Barack Obama and John McCain, the more liberal members of the electorate had nowhere to go, so they placed their hopes firmly behind the Democratic candidate. That, coupled with the incessant characterizations of Obama in the press as "liberal", a code word for everything bad in America from black nationalism to communism, resulted in an unrealistic and irrational expectation that Obama would implement a "liberal agenda". Hence all the shock and outrage from the left over his policies.

But there was never any realistic hope that Obama would pursue any truly liberal policy. The Health Care reform legislation he champions is really intended to be the salvation of the American economy, not the American insurance consumer, just as cap and trade is at least an attempt to be an adult and take responsibility for the well being of the planet. America is schizophrenic - the population is overwhelmingly liberal in their viewpoint, but overwhelmingly conservative in their politics. And it's going to take more than 8 disastrous years to expose the failings of these policies and leave them truly discredited. It's going to take something far more catastrophic.

Which leads me to an odd thought. I find myself wondering if we continue to elect center-right populist Democrats and our political system continues to cause them to fail, driving the election of increasingly Right-wing radical fundamentalists, who bring about such disasters that the electorate turns in desperation to another center-right Democrat, America will muddle along a downward path, slouching toward irrelevance, poverty and declining living standards. So maybe what is necessary is a much greater shock to the system. Perhaps the left should just sit back with folded arms and let them elect a Huckabee, a Palin, a Santorum. Maybe before we can begin to run this nation in an effective and compassionate manner the train needs not only to leave the tracks, but explode in a toxic fireball.

Imagine it's the summer of 2010. Unemployment is still high, consumer spending is still down, GDP growth is flat. Health care "reform" turned out to be nothing but a giveaway to the insurance industry, Waxman-Markey died in the Senate, the Immigration reform "debate" turned into a nativist racist horrorshow, and in 2011 Obama had no option but to raise taxes across the board, breaking a campaign promise he never should have made in the first place. The Republicans are successful in painting his first term as a failure, which allows them to claim their policies would have worked. They still insist on unquestioned ideological purity, and at the convention they nominate one of their most ignorant, nativist, war-loving, fear-mongering luminaries.

Whatever the result might be, if the world is not a smoking, radioactive ruin in 2016 it should be the end, for all time, of these lunatic, anti-science, theocratic authoritarians and their angry, violent, irrational followers. It seems to me that a case can at least be made that the best hope America has for a sustainable future over the next 10-25 years is to let them go ahead and break it quickly so we can get on with the job of fixing it.

posted by mikey @ 1:58 PM