While I was traveling earlier this week, I was disheartened to pick up Monday’s print New York Times and find three front-page stories hinting at the zeitgeistiness of libertarianism. I’m counting the story about self-appointed crime-fighters in superhero costumes as libertarian, because that sort of Vigilantism Lite presupposes that government is hopelessly inadequate; I’m also counting the story about Asperger’s kids in love because the young man featured in the story is an avowed libertarian. (The third of the front-page stories was about Ron Paul.)
Capitalism ran amok in the last decade ,and we’re still trying to bounce back from the mayhem — and yet, for all the attention lavished on the Occupy movement in recent months, the hip ideology of our era is clearly the one that wants to take capitalism and remove as many restraints from it as possible, thus giving it far greater opportunities for rapaciousness. Frankly, this terrifies me. It terrifies me that the repulsiveness of Ron Paul’s newsletters of the ’80s and ’90s is now widely known and yet the Paul Youth in Iowa clearly don’t care. What if this really is to our time what ’60s leftism was to that era. What if this is the spirit of the age?
Well, maybe Democrats and liberals have ourselves to blame. I saw that Charlie Pierce was attacking David Brooks a couple of days ago for writing this:
But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.
Pierce’s response was this:
Yes, because we have had 30 years of reckless vandalism by the political movement in which you cut your teeth. We have had three decades of anti-government rhetoric from people who then set out to prove themselves correct by cutting taxes, spending money on useless weaponry, conducting wars off the books, and hiring boobs and bunglers to staff the federal agencies. We have had Michael Brown. We have had James Watt. We have had Anne Gorsuch and Silent Sam Pierce. People don’t trust government? You know what? I don’t trust my car if I hire a blind drunk to drive it.
But you can’t just blame Republican presidents and Republican appointees. Democrats come into office and simply fail to demonstrate to the public that government can work — Barack Obama’s administration didn’t modify enough mortgages, didn’t inject enough stimulus into the economy to get a significant number of people back to work, didn’t throw any of the Wall Street bastards in jail. There wasn’t even a single perp walk! If people don’t see government working to help solve a new crisis, I guess it shouldn’t surprise us when they think government doesn’t do anything right, ever. But elected Democrats no longer think this matters — they no longer think government has to work or the foundations of this society will crumble as we move inexorably to a Third World level of inequality.
Give people a reason to believe in government — or wake up twenty years from now to find that America has only two widely held ideologies left, mainstream Republicanism and libertarianism, and the banana-republican economy to go with that arrangement.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
But you can’t just blame Republican presidents and Republican appointees. Democrats come into office and simply fail to demonstrate to the public that government can work — Barack Obama’s administration didn’t modify enough mortgages, didn’t inject enough stimulus into the economy to get a significant number of people back to work, didn’t throw any of the Wall Street bastards in jail.
And yet Democrats/liberals/Progressives who complain about this are called Firebaggers/Emo-progs/pro-left and other epithets. Go figure!!
Sure, and I’ll continue to use those terms — as long as the Firebaggers have absolutely no solutions to propose, apart from lunacy like allying with Grover Norquist or throwing in with Gary Johnson because he’s anti-war and pro-hemp.
You can use those terms if you want, but imo it’s bad strategy if you have any genuine motivation to persuade readers to your point of view.
If I think Obama has been a good, perhaps excellent president (under the circumstances), then someone out there starts spouting about O-bots and I wonder if they’re talking about me, and then I resent it just in case. If I have (and I do) reasoned and legitimate criticisms about Obama, then I see the term “firebagger” getting tossed around and I wonder if they’re talking about me, assume they are and resent that, too.
To be blunt, I think it’s pretty fucking stupid to be throwing language like that around when speaking to someone who, in an idealogical sense at least, is supposed to be on your side, because it shortcuts the rational thinking center of the brain straight into the adrenal glands. You want to influence hearts and minds, maybe use more respectful language. You want to piss folks off and alienate those with different viewpoints than your own, fire away.
I mean really, how many liberals out there are calling to embrace Grover Norquist? Seriously, what, maybe 3? How many liberals even know wtf Gary Johnson is? 12? Your firebaggers and Obots are straw men, and worse, they’re lazy incendiary catch-all terms that tend to be thrown around in a purposefully indirect way so that nobody even knows for certain if they’re being called out.
It’s a damn good way to drive wedges through your own coalition, if that’s what you’re about.
Go read the comments at FDL. Go try criticizing Obama at The People’s View.
But I do support your message overall.
Steven, I thought you were the sane voice in this forest. Just because I don’t propose a solution to a stroke doesn’t mean that I need to keep my trap shut about it and die.
Democrats come into office and simply fail to demonstrate to the public that government can work
Obama hauled the national–and world–economy off the edge of a cliff, saved the American auto industry, ended a disastrous war, repealed DADT, and added health coverage for millions of Americans.
If he was a Republican, his partisans would promote his record of accomplishment. Owing to his misfortune that he’s a Democrat, a significant segment of his party files his accomplishments under F for failure.
Obama hauled the national–and world–economy off the edge of a cliff, saved the American auto industry, ended a disastrous war, repealed DADT, and added health coverage for millions of Americans.
Yes, but what about emotionally-satisfying staged perp walks?
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At least the NRA thinks so and has advised its members to restock arms and munition. Their success depends on fearmongering amongst the voters.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."At this point I’m not so sure they won’t say any Democratic victory is inevitable. The NRA is the AMA of firearms nowadays; they don’t care about gun rights (patients/fixing health care), but ensuring their industry continues to grow strong to fill their pockets.
Wait, what? I was right with you through the first half of the post, but then you turn around and blame Democrats? You could make a case that they haven’t fought hard enough to preserve government, or that they’ve allowed themselves to be influenced by the tsunami of right-wing propaganda that Charlie Pierce is talking about, but they’re not the ones who’ve invested all their energies in tearing it all down. And they’re the only party from whom you’re going to hear any kind of defense of government at all. (Which, by the way, is already emerging as a central theme in Obama’s reelection campaign.)
And another factor that you forget is that Republicans have managed to put all kinds of straitjackets on government, especially at the state level, that let them stop the government from working without even being in the majority. Prop 13, for instance, is the single biggest obstacle to effective government in California. We’ll never be able to raise taxes while the Republicans are able to win at least a third of the legislature, and as long as we can’t taxes we’re going to keep watching our state government crumble. And’t it’s not the Democrats who are cheering this whole process on.
Ultimately, though, I’m not really sure what is the point of blaming Democrats for not defending government vigorously enough as we head into a critically important election year. If we lose this election, maybe we can start up the circular firing squad at that time. At the moment, I for one am more interested in convincing people to vote for Democrats (if only for the sake of not electing Republicans and libertarians) than cataloging Obama’s failures.
There wasn’t even a single perp walk! If people don’t see government working to help solve a new crisis, I guess it shouldn’t surprise us when they think government doesn’t do anything right, ever.
And this is where people like you come in – or, rather, where people like you could come in – by discussing the important but obscure actions the government has taken.
But you don’t want to do that. You’d rather complain that there aren’t perp walks on the evening news, and work your ass off explaining why the ones that the public has noticed are actually betrayals and irrelevant.
The public has noticed perp walks?
Read it again.
For “ones” substitute “the important but obscure actions the government has taken” — now do you see? Not the most felicitous phrasing, to be sure; I had to think about it for a moment before I got it.
List the ones the public has noticed.
I can’t speak for Joe, but I think the gist of what he means is along these lines:
I recall, sometime after the earliest-effective provisions of the health act came into force, a dKos member posted a diary about how the act had helped a member of his family in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before.
The diary was promptly flooded with “Where’s my public option? Obama sold us out!” screechers, some of whom made some mighty ugly ad hominem attacks.
I recall other such contemptuously dismissive reactions to any positive comments about the health act and its initial results being de rigueur at dKos, at least while I was still reading it. Haven’t been back there for quite some time, though, not at all since the mass purge of uppity posters; perhaps the culture has since become less toxic to any expressions of support for Obama.
This probably isn’t what you’re looking for; as I said, Joe can speak for himself; but I do think it at least captures a sense of what he means.
Recovery Act.
Health Care Reform.
Near-annihilation of al Qaeda leadership.
Iraq Withdrawal.
Ending the practice of using torture to gain intelligence against terrorist threats.
Support Libyan rebels.
DATD repeal.
It’s strange that statements like this are made in passing without asking the fundamental question of why this is.
And it’s true at the federal level, the state level in all the states (there are no state legislatures that I know of without Democrats). And it’s true at the county and mumicipal level (even when Democrats and Republicans run in “nonpartisan” elections).
Zoning and permitting can be re-jiggered through new ordinances and council decisions. Corporations can get tax benefits for relocating even if they don’t bring jobs. (Dell Computer walked away with a $400 million tax break in NC and closed the facility two years later.) The real estate, banking, public utility, billboard, and healthcare industry can get special breaks. And Democrats have been dominant in most states in getting state lotteries that do little to add to state finances. And in other forms of gam(bl)ing.
What it is is corporate bribery and extortion, both totally legal. The pressure is to be corrupt or be swamped with negative campaign ads and highly financed challengers. And there are numerous cases of those who said no and were defeated.
On the left, the fascination with libertarianism is its isolationism, anti-prohibition stance on drugs, and push to end the public-private partnership boondoggles that always seem to benefit the corporations and never the public. On the right, the fascination is with it toleration of bigotry, promotion of gun rights, antagonism against internation institutions, and push for a gold standard that ends the Fed.
Right-wing libertarians see the Fed as government intrusion into banking. Left-wing libertarians see the Fed as the corporate capture of a government function.
What unites them is summed up in a sign that was at OccupyCaucus in Iowa. There are three party choices (1) Republican, (2) Democrat, (3) Pissed off. That shows what’s driving the libertarian mood as well as a lot of other “plague on both your houses” movements.
And it seems to be a label-fad among a lot of people who are tired of all the family arguments at holidays and can’t get away with saying “neither”.
Isn’t it time we stop throwing labels around and start talking about specific principles and policies? Every discussion really does not boil down to “pro-Obama” or “anti-Obama”. The Presidency really is a small part of the picture in American (or global) politics. We do not live in the monarchy that George Bush pretended we lived in nor the one that a lot of frustrated progressives wanted Barack Obama to deliver.