Just to let you know, I didn’t miss BoBo’s offering today. I just didn’t feel like writing about it. There is actually one small part of it with which I agree. He’s concerned that our elites consider themselves anti-Establishment. I don’t really care too much that some Cornell undergraduate thinks he’s oppressed but, as I’ve mentioned several times, I don’t like that the progressive left is stuck in an anti-Establishment hangover from the 1960’s. Our goal should be to become the Establishment, but that will never happen until we stop defining ourselves as the permanent outsiders. It may not feel like we’re winning sometimes, but our values are growing more normalized and mainstream all the time. We ought to be acting like we are the natural leaders (the elite, in David Brooks terminology) of this country. But, we don’t. We act like we’re too pure to be defiled by anything as dirty as raw power.
As for the rest of Brooks’ column, talk like that will get you punched in the face in about 99% of the bars in this country.
…including the Applebees salad bars.
Brooks is shitty, shitty writer that after my first time through the column I was trying to figure out why Brooks was arguing tat everything went to hell once the Jews took over the banks and the media. Some folks convinced me that I’d been mislead by the huge pile of Brooksian word salad, and it was just more of his ersatz Burke routine.
How should the left act like natural leaders?
To succeed at becoming the Establishment means playing the inside game. The progressive left has values that make that very difficult–always on the knife-edge between cutting off further gains or being co-opted. And it’s not like the current Establishment will welcome the progressive left with open arms.
Where I fault the progressive left is in the failure to do its homework. It has been blindsided procedurally too much, for example. What member of the progressive caucus in Congress has mastered the procedural ins and outs of their House of Congress with understanding of a Lyndon Johnson or a Tip O’Neill or a Robert Byrd? How many grassroots progressives know how to put together a primary and general election campaign that can win? How many progressives know how to take over a precinct organization in a way that moves the progressive movement forward.
The fact that progressive values are becoming normalized and mainstream even as the progressive movement is being marginalized means very clearly that the elite does not equate to natural leaders. It also means that as progressives we need to ask what does progress require next.
Meanwhile labor is rediscovering its ability to exert raw power. Hispanics have discovered how to exert raw power. The LGBT community has discovered how to exert raw power. Even the environmental movement knows how to exert raw power. But they are all on the outside and no one on the inside is anything but tactically aligned with them on one or another issue.
Finally, leaders don’t create power; followers do. There is something contradictory in progressive democrats demanding leaders. Once followers come to a concensus, they can put up a qualified spokesperson or representative. That person need not take on the attributes and attitudes of a leader.
We need a bench of candidates to get their hands dirty at the local level (this means 20- to 30-somethings) to begin the retaking of the levers of power where they are most easily taken.
Well done. I miss you when you’re not here.
Also, we don’t want to become the Larry Kissells or Jon Testers(remember he campaigned on repealed the Patriot Act back in ’06). So we are very suspicious of those in D.C. And how many people here could put up with a Steny Hoyer or Steve Israel if they really knew how sleazy those two really are?
One of the main things I think progressives are doing wrong is that we’re not understanding where we stand in relationship to the opposition on the right.
We are in most ways, the conservative people in this country right now. I’d say “preservative people” that makes us sound like jelly or jam. But we want to preserve Social Security and Medicare. We want to preserve women’s reproductive rights. We want to preserve the power of unions. We want to go back to the old campaign finance laws. We want to restore the Clinton tax rates.
And so on. Sure, we may aspire to do more than that, but we’re on the defensive. So, we mainly want to keep the things the way they are or they way they were in the recent past. We don’t want major disruptions, except perhaps in the way our finance sector is regulated or our energy is produced.
And, yes, progressives have some radical ideas about our foreign policy (although, not too much consensus) and the war on drugs and aspirations for major changes in our criminal justice system and a few other areas. But almost none of that is really on the table right now in Washington. What’s on the table is austerity and a rearguard action against an all-out assault on the post-war consensus.
So, the proper place for a progressive to be right now is on the barricades defending a large part of the Establishment. But, you know, maybe we’re tripped up by drone attacks or Gitmo or the lack of a public option and we’re thinking we can’t defend the status quo at all on any level. Or, we just can’t do it enough that it matters.
What we need in addition to the kind of long-term grassroots organization building is a new disposition that we’re here to defend our shit from the barbarians. And, yes, our way of life is pretty good and worth fighting for.
And then the final element is that we’re winning the long war. Most obviously, the dam finally broke on gay rights during Obama’s first term, and we won on a whole host of issues. Soon the dam will break on immigration reform. And soon after that, maybe on energy. And we have some new momentum brewing for financial reform.
I think we’ll make headway soon on drugs.
So, we’re kind of winning in many areas just through a kind of demographic momentum. And we need to step up and say, “progressive values are mainstream values and we’re going to make them Establishment values. We’re taking over this shit.”
Until we cop that pro-American can-do attitude, we’ll just be gadflies and malcontents.
When it comes to the way that the government subsidizes and enables corporations to work against the economic interests of the US public, progressives are not conservative.
We are not just defending Social Security, we are seeking a change to the present status quo that provides ordinary folks with adequate pensions and de-subsidizes the pensions of the wealthy.
We certainly do not want to return to the way things were in the recent (1970 is not so recent) past; we want to move forward the economic agenda that halted in 1969. We want to move forward the alternative energy agenda that was halted in 1980. We want to move forward on the environmental agenda that was halted in 2000. We want to move forward beyond the Wall Street reforms that were passed in the Dodd-Frank bill. We want to move forward beyond the ACA. We don’t want to defend the helpful parts of the status quo as an objective; he have to as a minimum tactic.
We don’t need to say that progressive values are mainstream values. What we have to say is that the mainstream values that are progressive values are in fact progressive values. We have to name the name. And we have to say that the mainstream values that are liberal values are in fact liberal values. And know which are which and not just treat “progressive” and “liberal” as synonyms.
And out movements, including Occupy, need to take a page from the overseas Occupy movements. Those show up with oodles of their national flags. In the US, the movement shows up with upside-down flags or the corporate stars-and-stripes. That might express one’s feelings but that is no longer tactically effective and American flags are. Just imagine a batallion of riot cops wading in swinging to a forest of American flags.
It’s not the attitude, it’s the symbols. There is an immense amount of building of alternative institutions going on in this country that is mainstreamm, except in the media. There are left progressives with a can-do attitude even in the rural areas of the South. They are focusing on housing or environment or agriculture or health care, but they are building alternative institutions.
The issue over and over that these people are facing are the economic powers manipulating the political system to frustrate them or shut them down and continue their fat subsidies. Local, state, national–Democratic or Republican legislative majorities–it’s the same pattern. From the town of 200 to the state of California to the Congress. In zoning decisions, waivers of environmental impact statements, occupational safety regulations, mining regulations….politicians are getting in the way. That is what must be fixed.
But it cannot in a national security state that has militarized police forces, imposed state secrecy on most aspects of government (unless you are willing to fight the government in court), and diverted a trillion dollars to the military industrial complex and no telling how much to the prison industrial complex. That is why war and peace is important.
And drones. Unlike other weapons systems, even nuclear weapons, drones are destabilizing because of their low cost in dollars and lives. Like nuclear weapons, the short time frame for decision-making and discretion over targeting concentrates power in the hands of the executive. With NDAA, the President has the legal authority to use drones against American citizens within the US. That means that instead of a government of laws, we have a government of men who ask us to trust them. That is a fundamental change from the Founders’ design of limitations on power. Mischief will come from that sooner or later as surely as the military-industrial-complex and a permanent state of war came out of the deployment of nuclear weapons. We can’t roll back the clock or put the gift back in Pandora’s box, but we can start taking seriously that we are on a dangerous path that empowers non-state actors and centralized executives.
Finally, I think within the last year we turned on the offensive again. Scott Walker and the debt crisis were wake-up calls and a lot of folks decided to fight back. Even the new OFA ad says that Romney is not the solution, he is the problem.
One line in particular from Bobo’s column pissed me off so much that I wrote the following response:
Nice effort to justify the position of the elite and play on stereotypes of the poor by claiming that the elite “work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.” Perhaps if you left your $3.95 million mansion and hung out more at your imaginary Applebee’s salad bar, Mr. Brooks, you’d realized how far off you are.
Many people “down the income scale” work as hard as the elite do. Unfortunately, due to a stagnant minimum wage, the evisceration of unions, and the vulture capitalism that has led to the slashing of wages and benefits, such work no longer provides as much of a chance to improve one’s economic situation. Instead, people like waitresses, store clerks, elder caregivers, meatpackers, farmworkers, etc. work long hours, often at multiple jobs, simply to make ends meet. And the work is typically much more taxing and sometimes dangerous than is “taking part in conference calls” while sitting in a waiting room.
So, yes, let’s have a serious conversation about class and the elites in America. But in a country where wealth is increasingly becoming the province of inheritance, winning at the casino that is Wall Street, or feeding off the carcass of once-thriving businesses, let’s not pretend like “people down the income scale” are simply lazy.