White liberals, white racism and criticism of Obama

Melissa Harris-Perry's article Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama The Nation 09/21/2011 is getting quite a bit of attention. She uses only some very general statistics and no individual examples to strongly suggest that an "insidious form of racism" is behind criticism of President Obama by white liberals/progressives.

Joan Walsh has a long, thoughtful response to the article in Are white liberals abandoning the president? Salon 09/25/2011. Harris-Perry responds to Walsh's criticism in The Epistemology of Race Talk The Nation 09/26/2011.

I think Walsh definitely has the better of the interchange, which I won't try to summarize here, other than to say that the gist of it is that Harris-Perry makes an unconvincing, impressionistic case that (a) white liberals are more critical of the Obama Administration than they were of the Clinton Administration, and (2) that difference is likely to result from white racism among progressives. Walsh explains straightforwardly why both premises are highly questionable. Harris-Perry's response could work well for someone angling for a "FOX Democrat" gig arguing that liberals are the real white racists.

Two points I haven't seen in the discussion on this yet:

1. President Obama in the debt-ceiling negotiations offered the Republicans a Grand Bargain that would cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. This is bad policy in itself and bad politics for the Democrats. These programs are essential for the vast majority of Americans and are very popular because of that. It would be remarkable in the extreme if Obama weren't getting sharp criticism over that.
2. Obama's "triangulation" politics, especially since the 2010 election, has involved defining himself as a centrist by emphasizing his differences with Democratic liberals. In speech after speech, he's highlighted how members "of my own Party" differ with him over policies. Already in 2009, Obama's then Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was calling liberal activists "f*****g retarded" for trying to put pressure on Blue Dog Democrats, pressure meant to bolster Obama's ostensible position on the health care reform. Later, Rahm apologized to the disabled for using the word "retarded." No apologies to Democratic progressives were forthcoming.

Harris-Perry's "Epistemology of Race Talk" post employs what I assume is some sort of postmodern standard of evidence that is worth noting:

[There] is a common strategy of asking any person of color who identifies a racist practice or pattern to "prove" that racism is indeed the causal factor. This is typically demanded by those who are certain of their own purity of racial motivation. The implication is if one cannot produce irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias, then racism must be banned as a possibility. But this is both silly as an intellectual claim and dangerous as a policy standard.

Readers can judge for themselves whether Joan Walsh is demanding "irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias" in her article. She obviously is not.

But what Joan does do is look at the available polling evidence and asks whether they indicate race as a significant factor in Obama's approval ratings among white liberals. Which is a perfectly sensible approach. Such patterns can be reasonably detected or inferred from opinion polls and other social-science and marketing data without requiring "irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias." Even the US legal system with the assumption of the innocence of the accused doesn't require "irrefutable evidence" to convict someone of a felony, only evidence beyond a "reasonable doubt."

Melissa Harris-Perry made a claim based on historical assumptions (the popularity of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during their first terms) for which there is evidence on which to test the claim. I certainly have no "irrefutable evidence" that she's wrong. Nor would I say that "racism must be banned as a possibility." But her claim doesn't hold up to the scrutiny to which Joan Walsh subjects it.

Tags: joan walsh, melissa harris-perry, racism, white racism

Joan Walsh gets conned by Lost Cause talking points

Lost Cause pseudohistory keeps popping up in all sorts of places, some of them quite unlikely. Joan Walsh provided an example of the latter in Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong Salon 06/09/2011. Reviewing the book America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (2011) by David Goldfield, she gets taken in by a number of Lost Cause tropes.

The Lost Cause pseudohistory of the American Civil War has had a huge effect on Americans' understanding of the country's history, Joan's column being a very recent example. But the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate ideology is primarily an ideology to justify post-Civil War white supremacy and segregation in the Southern States, the former Confederacy. The historical distortions are large side-effects of the ideology.

Whatever Northern whites may have thought about slavery before the Civil War, by the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, they had come to hate it. Not only had the South's "peculiar institution" led to a massively destructive civil war. Hundreds of thousands of American troops had also come directly into contact with slaves on Southern plantations or "contrabands" (escaped slaves) coming across to Union lines. The Union had even commissioned companies of African-American troops who had fought well for the Union cause, thus severely undercutting some of the worst racist stereotypes that slaveowners had used to justify slavery.

So one thing white Southerners and former Confederate military and political leaders wanted to do after the war was to dissociate themselves and the Confederate cause from slavery. In theory, anyone who had taken up arms against the United States might have been subject to prosecution for treason. In 1865, that would have included a large percentage of white adult males in the former Confederate states. Confederate military officers and officials of the former Rebel government also faced the prospect of legal disabilities, like denial of the vote or the right to hold office. So they had incentive to clean up their now-lost Confederate cause in public memory to the extent they could.

So they denied that the war had been about slavery or that slavery had caused the war. Since the Confederate leaders and seceding states couldn't have made it any more clear in 1860-61 that they were seceding in order to preserve slavery from the (to them) sinister designs of Abraham Lincoln and his "Black Republicans," as the pro-slavery advocates called them, that was a hard sell for anyone who wasn't a white Southerner inclined to follow revanchist leaders in 1865. And for decades after the Civil War, Lost Cause pseudohistory was primarily a Southern phenomenon. In the first half of the 20th century, it came to have an outsize effect on American history generally.

Lost Cause ideology was adopted by the Democratic Party in the South, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and the "Redeemers" - opponents of the democratic governments established in the Southern states during Reconstruction. (I don't mean to imply that those were three separate groups; they were largely synonymous with one another.) So with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the widespread disfranchising of African-American citizens, the sharecropping system, and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s, all those from the postwar period were incorporated into the Lost Cause ideology.

The Lost Cause pseudohistory of the postwar period was ideologically more important than the pseudohistory of the Civil War itself, because the KKK "Redeemers" weren't trying to re-establish chattel slavery. They did establish and maintain a highly discriminatory, authoritarian, white supremacist form of rule in the former Confederacy, varying in intensity from state to state. Lost Cause/neo-Confederate pseudohistory became part of the dominant white Southern narrative of white victimhood: The Yankees hate us, the Yankees lie about us, the Yankees are fanatics and hypocrites, yadda, yadda.

Today's Republican Party has come a long way from its roots in the pre-Civil War antislavery movement. Today, white victimhood has become a major part of the Republicans' ideology. Rush Limbaugh, FOX News and Republican talk radio promote it constantly. Alex Pereene recently reported on how Matt Drudge is promoting a counterfactual narrative about a threatening crime wave by scary black people. Digby perceptively comments on that latter development, "Drudge has a long history of injecting certain GOP memes into the political bloodstream. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the beginning of a concerted campaign." (Drudge's summer of rage? Hullabaloo 06/09/2011)

The well-established themes of Lost Cause pseudohistory fit comfortably into this present-day Republican framework. And in fact, neo-Confederate/Lost Cause themes continue to become more prominent in Republican political narratives. Even though Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's flirtation with a Presidential run fizzled out this year, his defenses of Confederate Heritage Month and of the white-supremacist Citizens' Council's anti-integration campaigns are just two of many recent illustrations of how interwoven the neo-Confederate themes are with today's Republican Party messaging. The spread of Arizona-type anti-immigrant laws, along with anti-Latino racism and anti-Muslim hysteria are examples of how segregationist policies are also embraced by today's Republicans.

I haven't read Goldfield's book, so I can't confirm how accurately Joan Walsh is rendering his arguments, though I would be surprised if weren't doing a decent job in that respect. What is surprising and disappointing is that she seems downright gullible about common Lost Cause tropes: Lincoln wasn't really an Abolitionist. Northern whites hated black people. Northern capitalists had business interests different from those of Southern planters. Yankees of the 1850s and 1860s didn't believe in equality as we think of it in 2011. Freed slaves weren't in such a great situation after the war.

Those who have paid some attention to breaking down Lost Cause arguments will be immediately familiar with how neo-Confederate pseudohistory uses those very arguments. Joan even presents this hack Lost Cause argument as worthy of serious consideration:

Most controversially, Goldfield argues passionately -- with strong data and argument, but not entirely convincingly -- that the Civil War was a mistake. Instead of liberating African Americans, he says, it left them subject to poverty, sharecropping and Jim Crow violence and probably retarded their progress to become free citizens.

This is a "highbrow" rehash of the Lost Cause argument that says that, why, slavery would have faded out on its own if them thar damnyankees hadn't tried to interfere with it! The slaveowners would have freed their slaves voluntarily. Someday. [cough] About the time Hail freezes over. [cough, cough] It's difficult to see how anyone not entirely innocent of the defenses that real existing slaveowners  were making of their Peculiar Institution in the 1850s and the policies they were pursuing could think such an argument could pass the laugh test. With or without a qualifier like "not entirely convincingly."

Historian William Freehling does the best job I've seen in explaining what may seem odd to those not especially familiar with early 19th-century American history, that white racism could be entirely compatible with opposition to slavery, even with bitter opposition to and hatred of it. Since only blacks were legally supposed to be enslaved in the US states, most Northern whites associated slavery with the presence of black people. Freehling relates this historically to the fact that in Northern states, voluntary abolition of slavery coincided with those states becoming increasingly white due to natural growth and white immigration. Hostility to blacks was not only compatible with opposition to slavery, the combination of the two was very common. One of the best examples of that was the Southern abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909), who was a hardcore white supremacist both before and after the Civil War, but whose book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857) was one of the most effective and influential indictments of the slavery system.

It's true that anyone who claimed that the Civil War came about because of overwhelming opposition to white racism among Northern whites would be mistaken. But who the hell ever made such an argument?

One item in Joan's recounting of Goldfield's Lost Cause arguments that seemed unfamiliar to me was this one:

Republicans were first and foremost the party of small business, an emerging class of industrialists, the nascent middle class, and anti-Catholic nativists. They despised the working class – or denied it existed. Lincoln himself talked of the emerging caste of wage-earners optimistically as "young beginners," who would work for a time, save money, then buy land and/or their own business. Republicans either couldn't imagine an America with a permanent class of laborers (like Lincoln), or they dreamed of one, but found ways to convince those workers it was all in their interest.

Say what? So just what did Lincoln mean when he said in his first annual message to Congress (12/03/1861):

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. [my emphasis]

I guess one could take this as evidence that Lincoln and his Republican Party "despised the working class – or denied it existed." Or, not. Lincoln made that statement in the following context of arguing against what he saw as a badly mistaken notion of democracy:

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.

Lincoln's argument was against such a notion, which to him was an outrageous one.

I'll be on the lookout for other commentary on Goldfield's book and Joan's column. But she seriously needs to bone up on the whole Lost Cause ideology before she tackles this topic again.

Tags: david goldfield, joan walsh, lost cause, neo-confederate

Organized labor and the (neoliberal) Democratic Party

Any way I look at it, I can't come up with any feasible way that progressive politics on the scale and effectively of the New Deal can be made successful without a revitalized - i.e., larger - union movement.

Joan Walsh has an important interview with AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, Richard Trumka declares labor's independence Salon 05/06/2011. Digby comments on it in Money Talks, Liberals Walk Hullabaloo 05/09/2011 and Greg Sargent in Will labor soften support for Dems in 2012? The Plum Line 05/09/2011.

Trumka clearly sees a need for the labor movement to apply more pressure to the Democratic Party and make it harder for Democratic incumbents to take labor for granted. Joan Walsh writes:

Trumka's AFL-CIO famously bucked the White House, supporting Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter's unsuccessful primary challenge to Blue Dog Sen. Blanche Lincoln. When Halter lost, anonymous White House officials attacked labor leaders as "absolute idiots" who had been "humiliated" after flushing $10 million "down the toilet." In an interview last week Trumka seemed unchastened by attacks over the Halter bid, and he pledged the AFL-CIO to a new independence from Democratic Party organizations and candidates. He didn't spell out exactly what that might mean, citing decisions to be made by the federation's governing Executive Council. "You'll see us giving less to party structure, and more to our own structure," Trumka promised. "It's actually going to be fun."

Tags: democratic party, joan walsh, richard trumka

Obama's re-election campaign

Utopia won't be on the ballot in 2012. But I hope a primary challenge to Barack Obama will be.

I don't think it's likely that a primary challenge would succeed in unseating Obama as the Democratic nominee. But what it would do is give the Democratic base a way to register our objections to Obama's general approach, which in a more sane political environment would be called conservative. Obama is not going to morph into a 21st-century Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. He's not that guy. He's too cautious in his style, too wedded to the worst features of the national security state and too eager to please Wall Street in his economic proposals.

But a serious primary challenge from a liberal/progressive candidate could scare him into taking a more progressive stand on economic issues like foreclosure relief, employment and consumer protection. It could discourage him from new military adventures or from further escalation in Afghanistan and Libya. And it would likely force him to back off from the most destructive of his neoliberal inclinations and unambiguously defend Social Security against the Republicans and the Pete Petersons of the world.

Here's the Obama campaing's lackluster opening video, which is apparently aimed at getting the grass roots supporters (aka, "the left" in Punditspeak) who he has been posturing against for months and months fired up about campaigning for him:



We live in a two-party environment in the United States. That means that people with serious ideas about politics, especially those outside what our Pod Pundits take to be the current mainstream, have to be able to walk and talk at the same time - in this context meaning that we have to recognize the differences between the two parties while keeping in mind the deficiencies of the one we prefer. Pointing out that Obama's austerity policies are damaging doesn't mean that we have to forget that John Boehner's austerity policies are even more destructive, or that crackpots like Michelle Bachman would cause far more harm than Obama's failings.

Joan Walsh opposes any primary challenge to Obama. I don't agree with her position on that. But she does have a good analysis of the reasons it could be problematic from a progressive Democratic viewpoint (Obama 2012: Let's talk next year Salon 04/04/2011):

I [also] oppose a primary challenge from the left because I believe it would keep progressives trapped in the fiction that presidential campaigns are the be all and end all of progressive politics. They're not, as Obama's election should have proven to everyone. MoveOn, Dean-turned-Democracy for America and much of the lefty blogosphere went all-in for Obama, lauding him as the true-blue progressive in the race, when he was not. They helped bring him the Democratic nomination he should have had to at least compete for among progressives. (Do people now understand that his praising Reagan and saying Social Security needed fixing might have been harbingers of the way he's led?) They dissipated energy that could have been spent in other ways; progressive groups have spent the last two years trying to figure out how to organize the base for truly progressive causes, rather than allegiance to a centrist Democratic president. Meanwhile, the stunning organizing achievements of Obama for America in 2008 -- building an email list of 13 million names, 4 million donors and 2 million active volunteers -- were never put behind a grass-roots effort to support Obama's agenda. We know from the New York Times that the Bill Daley White House shut down an effort by OFA to back the Wisconsin protests.

Joan is basing this observation on the experience of 2008. Obama encouraged liberal donors to focus their contributions through the official campaign rather than through independent liberal groups. This was widely understood as a savvy move because it was generally thought that the diffusion of campaign effort between the Kerry campaign in 2004 and independent liberal groups was a weakness because it made message management more difficult. The Obama campaign also organized a grassroots support group, an effort led by Marshal Gans. All of this looked promising in the short run from both a Democratic Party and progressive activist point of view.

She's got a good point. We need independent progressive organization advocating for labor and civil rights, for Social Security and Medicare, against war and neoliberal economics.

But we also need a Democratic Party that will fight for democracy and programs like Social Security that are vital to the American way of life. Governors like Jerry Brown are showing that such a thing is possible at the state level. It's got to become possible again at the national level.

Tags: 2012 election, barack+obama, jerry brown, joan walsh

Is the White House letting yet another crisis go to waste? Nuclear waste, in this instance?

A couple of characteristics have emerged as defining aspects of President Obama's leadership style to date. One is what Marshall Ganz identified in How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back Los Angeles Times 11/03/2010.. The times in which Obama became President called for transformational leadership. But what the Obama Administration has provided has been transactional leadership: "The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead."

The other is a related point about Obama's response to crises, from David Bromwich in The Embarrassments of Empire: Washington Wonders What to Say about Arab Freedom TomDispatch 03/10/2011:

... Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. [The democratic upheaval in ] Egypt brought out the same pattern. [my emphasis]

Now the very serious Fukushima crisis in Japan has Obama has a second major environmental moment of opportunity in a year, BP being the other.

And how is our transactional-minded President responding? Joan Walsh explains (The nuclear credibility gap Salon 03/16/2011):

... American leaders are putting their own credibility at risk by being so quick to reiterate the Obama administration's commitment to expanding nuclear power in the U.S. On Wednesday [Secretary of Energy Steven] Chu told Congress that officials planned to look at the "lessons" of the Japan disaster -- but he also told Rep. Joe Barton (R-Energy Industry) that the president continues to support expanding nuclear power in the U.S. at a cost to taxpayers of $36 billion, mainly in loan guarantees for new reactors, and to fund new small, modular reactors. To meet the president's clean energy goals, Chu said, "We believe we will have to have some fraction coming from nuclear." Without knowing the "lessons" of the unforeseen Japanese disaster, I'm not sure why any administration leader is making a full steam ahead commitment to nuclear expansion.

Chu's statements highlight the Democratic Party's dreary record in developing a compelling safe, sustainable energy vision in the two years since they took control of Congress and the White House (of course they lost the House in November). Democrats blew so many opportunities when they took control in January 2009, it's hard to say what was the most disappointing. Their response to the economic crisis was an inadequate, politically compromised stimulus bill that's left too many Americans unemployed today. They passed financial regulatory reform that still offers plenty of room for the kinds of abuses that led to the 2008 mess. They extended the Bush administration's tax cuts for the super-wealthy, even though a promise to let them lapse had been central to most Democratic leaders' campaigns, including President Obama's, thus failing to reverse the steady upward transfer of wealth that's deformed American society over the last 30 years. [my emphasis]

As I mentioned in my previous post, nuclear power isn't economically feasible for private industry. They have to rely on major subsidies from governments, even before a Fukushima disaster happens and the government has to spend more piles of cash to deal with the crisis. American and German taxpayers are joining those from Japan in dealing with the results of the epic private enterprise failure at Fukushima.

Joan may overstate her point just a bit in the following. But it's still an excellent point:

Our profound lack of seriousness when it comes to energy policy is at the heart of most of our problems. Our reliance on coal is destroying the planet; our reliance on foreign oil and gas leads us to coddle Middle Eastern tyrants and meddle where we have no national interests except energy, and right now it's threatening our fledgling economic recovery as gas prices continue to spiral. Meanwhile, even as the Japanese nuclear crisis worsens, a Democratic energy secretary is reconfirming his support for nuclear power. [my emphasis]

I suppose I should add what's beginning to sound like a ritual disclaimer: a McCain-Palin Administration would have had a worse record on environmental issues. With the Republican Party in full science-denial mode on environmental issues, any Republican Administration in 2013 will be worse. But on energy policy including offshore drilling and nuclear power, "not as horrible as the Republicans" just isn't nearly good enough.

Tags: barack obama, joan walsh, marshall ganz, nuclear power, obama administration

Joan Walsh on adjusting to Obama's disastrous Afghanistan policy

There has been some amount of grumping among antiwar Democrats about whether Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is a betrayal of his campaign and of the trust his supporters put in him.

(I can't help but think in this connection about the phony hissy fit the Republicans threw about MoveOn.org's "General Betray-us" ad. Although that ad was a clumsy conception, no one actually has any trouble distinguishing between the concept of "betraying" the trust of supporters - in fact American politicians routinely accuse their opponents of betraying their supporters' trust - and accusing someone of betraying the country or of being a traitor to the nation.)

Other Democrats who also oppose the Afghanistan War are saying, weren't you people listening to what Obama was actually saying in his campaign of 2008? He said as clear as day that he intended to put more emphasis on the Afghanistan War and to send in more troops. I always expected to disagree with his Afghanistan policy because I disagreed with it during the campaign last year. I had hoped he would reassess his intent to escalate. But this is a campaign position that Obama is keeping and following through with. I hope in 2010 he's as eager to follow through on his 2008 support for the Employee Free Choice Act to protect workers' rights to organize unions.

Phyllis Bennis in her well-argued analysis of President Obama's Afghanistan Escalation Speech 12/02/09 at the Institute for Policy Studies site puts the case fairly, if a bit disingenuously, when she writes that his escalation speech Tuesday did not reflect "accountability ... to President Obama’s base, the extraordinary mobilization of people who swept this anti-war and anti-racist candidate into office."

But Joan Walsh has the better part of this particular little argument in The poster boy for progressive self-delusion Salon 12/02/09 when she scolds Tom Hayden for over-rating Obama's liberalism in his primary endorsement of Obama over Clinton. Joan's main point is this. Even though she voted for Obama over Clinton in the primaries by her own account, she makes a realistic and important point:

I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them.

Still, as entertaining as it may be to read her poking fun at the leaden quality of Tom's endorsement of Obama - "I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama" - I also think she isn't giving enough credit to the point that he was making in his 2008 endorsement. Just as Joan was struck at the time by the tone of it, I was struck by the fact that he was carefully qualifying that what he was really endorsing was the movement that coalesced around Obama's campaign. But she does quote this part:

We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined....

That's an important factor that we shouldn't lose sight of. The hopes that not just Obama activists but a large portion of the majority that voted for him placed in the potential Obama represented were bigger than the cautious candidate's stated positions. And if as President he can't show that he can and will deliver on major elements of those hopes, the Democrats could wind up blowing one of the most promising opportunities for progressive reforms that any American Presidential administration has ever had.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration

More on the "socialism" label

Salon's Joan Walsh writes in I was a teenage socialist! 03/10/09 that the New York Times' Peter Baker asking Obama if he's a socialist made her pay new attention to the Republicans Obama-is-a-socialist line and its possible persistence:

... John McCain and the right wing started calling Obama a "redistributionist" and a Marxist last fall.

I assumed it would fall flat with voters, most of whom had no adult memory of the days when "socialist" or "Marxist" was the sort of label that scared people, and I was right. But the right has hung onto the notion, and it's spreading a little bit -- CNBC's crazy Jim Cramer recently called Obama a "Bolshevik," an even older, more obscure, more irrelevant slur.

I hadn't really thought this outdated label could get attached to Obama, beyond the right-wing fringe and the increasingly defensive CNBC set, until I read the New York Times interview with Obama on Sunday.

The title of her article refers to the fact that as a beginning journalist she worked for In These Times, which in its early years described itself as a "socialist" paper.

Joan's article reminds me again that the discussion about "socialism" that the rightwing gasbags are having among themselves might as well be taking place in a parallel dimension from any such discussion happening among people who actually know something about the history and concepts of socialism over the last two centuries. Joan Walsh being in the latter group.

But there's a certain hazard in that. Last year, I read a book by the German writer Sebastian Haffner on the 1918 German democratic revolution which unseated the Emperor (Kaiser Bill) and established the parliamentary democracy that history knows as the Weimar Republic. Ever since then I've been thinking about doing a post on it. But I always put it off when I start thinking of how to troll-proof the post (to avoid easily-distorted wording) while also actually discussing what makes the book particularly interesting and doing so in a way that puts it in a meaningful context for American readers. I think I'm going to give it another try. So I suppose I'll need to think how to explain what a "workers council" of 1918 in Germany would mean in 2009 American terms. And it's not the language translation that's the challenge.

Sarah Posner, a longtime critical observer of the Christian Right, points out one of the ways in which Republicans frame "socialism" as a cuss word in their own way of thinking in The FundamentaList (No. 70) The American Prospect Online 03/04/09:

The berating of supposed "socialism" is not just an echo of cultural iconography of the rugged individualist American who brooks no government handouts or highfalutin food. It has roots in Christian fundamentalism, like that of religious-right granddaddy and renowned chronicler of the impending apocalypse Tim LaHaye. According to Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing movements at Political Research Associates, LaHaye claims that Satan himself "engineered" the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, bringing us the New Deal. That, in LaHaye's mind, was a conspiracy to turn the Constitution "upside down."

What most Americans call liberalism, LaHaye describes as an "alien philosophy." It is "antithetical" to the Bible, an "antichrist conspiracy" that "dominates the public school system from kindergarten through graduate school," controls the media and entertainment industry, and "elects a predominance of liberals to both parties in our national government."

Most elected Republicans would stop short of that in public, but their rhetoric at CPAC had that apocalyptic flavor. Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, complained, "A nation that raises its children in government schools cannot expect its people to stand for the principles of freedom." Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, added, "The laws of nature and of nature's God are the only touchstones of truth," and "the purpose of government is to secure these natural rights." But when "government goes beyond its high mission," it "replaces nature's God with a regulatory state." [my emphasis]

LaHaye, most famous as one of the authors of the Left Behind Christian fundamentalist series of novels, was once an adherent of the John Birch Society. It's crackpot outlook apparently has stuck with him.

It's also important for Democrats to remember that the Christian Right has developed a somewhat cult-like vocabulary for talking about politics. So where most people hear "socialism" and think it just means "bad" (or maybe "government ownership"). In the Christian Right vocabulary, it means something more sinister, an attack by the Devil on Truth and Christianity, an "antichrist conspiracy".

In her piece, Joan observes that the "socialist" accusation is meant as a distraction:

How much the government gets involved in the economy is a small-d democratic capitalist concern, and Obama follows in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, like it or not, as a liberal who cares about the poor but who nonetheless holds free-market principles as a given. Everybody left of Rush Limbaugh knows that. John McCain certainly knows that. This is another right-wing distraction from terrible economic problems that, frankly, could destroy American capitalism as we know it. And that's not a threat, it's a fact.

This is true. But for Democratic politicians, it won't be an adequate response to the accusation.

For the Christian Right, how the Dems respond basically won't make a difference. Obama will remain the scary black socialist-communist-fascist-babykilling Antichrist to them.

But this line of attack is also an example of what Josh Marshall calls the bitch-slap tactic. The Republican whacks a Democrat with some sleazy accusation. If the Dem successfully shoves it back into his face - e.g., "that's a bunch of sleazy lying nonsense and you ought to be ashamed to even say such a thing" - the Dem wins the exchange in the eyes of viewers. Bill Clinton did that well in one of his 1992 debates with Old Man Bush when Bush brought up the Republican accusation that Clinton had been an agent of the Soviet KGB. This stuff isn't totally new for the Republicans. And you don't have to go back to Joe McCarthy's heyday to find it either.

On the other hand, if the Dem comes off responding in a whiny way - "you're calling me names", "that's inappropriate language", etc. - it doesn't give the Republican accusation any more real-world credibility. Most people are not really worried that the Obama administration intends to expropriate the family car. But it does make the Dems look weak in the dramatic sense. The Dems are getting better at responding well to this. I hope I'm not indulging in simple wishful thinking in saying that. But they need to be able to consistently do the back-in-your-face response on this one.

Tags: christian fundamentalism,christian right, christianism, joan walsh, redbaiting

The media campaign against Obama picks up steam

This particular example has to do with FOX News labeling Michell Obama his "baby mama." But, as Joan Walsh points out in Oh no they didn't Salon 06/12/08 and the Daily Howler in his post of 06/11/08, Maureen Dowd of the "respectable" New York Times is also getting in on the action. Walsh:

Where do you even start when criticizing Fox's slur? Do you try to explain that "baby mama" is slang for the unmarried mother of a man's child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend? Are they racist, or just clueless? Isn't there racism even in their cluelessness, if somebody didn't know what "baby mama" means, but used it anyway? Even at Fox, won't somebody have to apologize? Am I wasting my time even thinking about that?

Even on a day when Maureen Dowd found time to "worry" about the coming attack on Michelle Obama, while at the same time passing along an ugly rumor about her (that would never have otherwise found its way into the New York Times), this was shocking.

And yes, those of us who've spoken out about the sexism faced by Hillary Clinton have to be vigilant about the vicious personal attacks we know await Michelle Obama (hell, did I just say "await?") I also can't help hoping that Obama supporters who denied Clinton faced sexism, but who are now outraged by the treatment of Michelle Obama, will have new insight into the dynamics of American media and politics, and new compassion for Clinton. Call me a crazy optimist: I'm expecting Fox to apologize, too! (my emphasis)

The media dysfunction that helped Obama against Clinton is now turning on the last Democratic candidate left standing. Our national press is broken. Badly, seriously broken.

Tags: barack obama, establishment press, joan walsh, mainstream media, mainstream press

As the dust starts to settle on the primaries

I want to flag the following three articles for what they say on the implications of the Democratic primary season that concluded this past Tuesday.

My friend Bob McElvaine has a blog on Huffington Post now. And at least a large part of Thursday, this new post was in the feature spot on the left where Arianna Huffington's latest normally is: America's 40 Years War at an End 06/05/08. It's about the evolution of the "culture war". He also manages to use the phrase "harmonic convergence" in the first paragraph, a nice touch indicating on which side of the barricades he's used to being. Bob is a real optimist, though. He's hoping for an immediate armistice in the "culture war". I tend to think it's more likely that Dick Cheney would surrender himself to the International Criminal Court and ask to be prosecuted for war crimes. But we can always hope. Bob goes after the "culture warriors" meme about liberal "elitism" in this one, so he's not advocating unilateral disarmament in this thing. And he also mentions Andrew Jackson as one of the great champions of "the People", another reason to read his post. This is a memorable line: "the Republican Party has been running as the anti-Sixties party for four decades now".

The other 18 million by Joan Walsh Salon 06/05/08. An excellent discussion of the sexism issue in the Democratic primaries, focusing particularly on the sorry role played by our badly dysfunctional national media.

The Meaning of Box 722 by Rick Perlstein, The Big Con blog 06/05/08 gives us a sobering look into raw white racism circa 1966. This is a good one, especially in seeing how institutional racism in the form of racial restrictions in housing interacts with personal racism.

Tags: culture war, joan walsh, rick perlstein, robert mcelvaine

Will a Democratic Party split help McCain invade Iran win in November?

I mentioned in the previous post that several commentators who often get things right are starting to talk about possibility of a Democratic Party split that could damage the nominee's chances in November: Jules Witcover (Explanations for Hillary's Plight TMS Features 05/28/08), Joan Walsh (A new low in Clinton bashing Salon 05/27/08) and Gene Lyons (Infighting threatens Democratic Party Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 05/28/08).

This hasn't worried me that much before now. And I still don't think that a lot of primary voters will decide to stay home just out of spite over who gets the nomination. But if either Clinton's or Obama's donors and local activists decide to take a pass on actively getting involved in the general election campaign, the effect could be the same.

Lyons, always well attuned to the world-historic dysfunction of our Establishment press puts it this way:

The political tragedy of 2008 would be if, in making history, the Democratic party tore itself apart. The potential exists for a schism between two of the party’s most loyal and enduring constituencies: African Americans, and blue-collar white voters in what was once the nation's industrial heartland along the Ohio River. Far more than the White House could be lost in November. Equally clear is that many in our esteemed national news media would enjoy helping that breakup happen. With incomes rivaling those of reserve infielders and egos inflated by TV celebrity, the courtiers, courtesans and character assassins of the imperial Washington press deem themselves America's rightful ruling class. Many no longer deny taking sides; at times, they’re even boastful. (my emphasis)

But even with a press corps as wrecked as ours, we can't blame everything on them.

Walsh - who did a really good job on Hardball this week, by the way - summarizes the grievances between the Clinton and Obama camps:

Thanks to my long weekend, I could probably get away without addressing the controversy over Clinton's RFK remarks, which is finally dying down. But I think this is an important and disturbing issue for Democrats. Criticize Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq war, her pandering on the gas tax holiday, her lame remarks about "hardworking Americans, white Americans," her response to Obama's "bitter" remarks, her lackluster campaign strategy coming into 2008. I've criticized all of that, and more. But to argue that she was suggesting she's staying in the race because Obama might be assassinated -- even after both Clinton, and the journalists who interviewed her, said her reference was to RFK's June campaign, not to his heartbreaking murder -- requires either a special kind of paranoia or venal political opportunism.

I understand the fears many people have about Obama's safety; given our country's tragic history, they are real and understandable. Suggesting Clinton was trying to play on such fears is different. Throughout this long campaign the Clintons have been turned into a vile caricature: amoral, power-mad narcissists who are not beyond using racism and even worries about Obama's safety to press their political cause. I've criticized both Clintons repeatedly in the pages of Salon for over 10 years, but it's really time to say: Enough.

For several months I've found myself bothered by a double standard in both the behavior and the media coverage of the Obama campaign, as supposedly representing a new kind of clean, post-partisan politics, by contrast with the dirty old win-at-any-cost Clintons. Hardball Obama campaign tactics -- David Axelrod partly blaming Clinton for Benazir Bhutto's death; the intimidation of Clinton voters by a pro-Obama union in Nevada (to be fair, some Obama supporters claimed intimidation by Clinton forces, too); the campaign's infamous South Carolina race memo (prepared before Bill Clinton made his dumb Jesse Jackson remark); the multiple "Harry and Louise" mailers distorting Clinton's healthcare proposal; not to mention ties between Obama, Axelrod and the Exelon Corp., even as Obama is touting his lobbyist-free campaign. Nothing seems to stick to Obama; he's Teflon.

But one thing this has shown us is that Obama is willing to fight. Which is what the Dems need to win in November. And that has always been my biggest worry about him, that he would go out there with a lot of happy talk about a postpartisan world and lose to McCain.

But Obama wasn't Teflon in the media's treatment of him during the height of the Jeremiah Wright flap. And the relatively favorable treatment he's gotten compared to Clinton can't be expected to continue. The press corps has a special, pathological hatred of the Clintons. Obama is unlikely to get the kind of flak from the press corps as she gets. But he will face a different media environment once he secures the nomination. And he'll need those Clinton supporters defending him against press trashing with goofy "scripts" about him. Like the insane little flap this week over the fact that Obama mentioned that his great-uncler had been part of liberated "Auschwitz", when he should have said "Buchenwald". That one didn't get much traction. But when Vile Hillary is out of the way, our punditocracy will be scraping for items like that to flog as though they were major scandals.

Witcover sums up the state of the Democratic contest to date, observing that the Clinton campaign "was outfoxed by the Barack Obama strategy of organizing fiercely in caucus states as well as in primaries, and ... failed to grasp the significance of the proportional allocation of delegates in every state."

He mentions the issue of sexism, including this example: "Occasional crowd signs calling on her to 'Shut Up and Make Me a Ham Sandwich' and other variations are cited as evidence of the sexism." He points out that she has also benefited from a strong women's vote, concluding, "It would be a stretch to assume all of that opposition is because she is a woman."

I'd have to say Witcover slipped into conventional press mode there, in that he turned a blind eye to the fact that she and her campaign, as well as many liberal observers, have called particular attention to her treatment by the press which has resulted in hostile coverage. Like the media crew on Meet the Press this past Sunday, he talks about the controversy in terms of sexism among voters.

But this is a fair observation, which gets to the question of her electability:

Against those voters who find her too tough for their liking, there are millions, particularly among women, whose admiration for her has deepened as she has shown herself to be not only a most articulate exponent of her views but also an incredibly tenacious fighter.

Many, many Democrats are looking to see the Party slam the Republicans and the Establishment press this year, and not let our candidate be Swift Boated to defeat and put John McCain in to start a war with Iran and press forward in Iraq to a even bigger disaster. Clinton fights. And lots of Democrats respect her for it, even if they (we) didn't entirely like some of the ways she went about it, as Joan Walsh noted.

Witcover takes a studied position on that flap. He puts it mildly, but it's clear he thinks that the interpretation that she was deliberately suggesting that she would be glad if somebody knocked off Obama is way off base:

[She made a] misstep [in[ the way, in reminding voters of the history of some past primary campaigns extending into June, she twice cited not just her husband's 1992 campaign but Robert F. Kennedy's run in 1968. If she had said only that, it's unlikely any fuss would have resulted.

But in a most inartful way, she unnecessarily noted his assassination. The blogosphere immediately pounced, drawing implications that she must have been alluding to rumored threats to Obama, as a way the nomination might yet fall to her. ...

It's hard to conceive that a woman as politically astute as Hillary Clinton would intentionally invite such an insensitive impression. Obama himself said he took her at her word that she intended nothing political about the remark, and RFK's own namesake son also absolved her of such intent. ...

The political world is awhirl about whether this thoughtless reference will be the last straw for uncommitted superdelegates, sending them rushing in repulsion from Clinton over to Obama's camp. If so, it will be a most unfortunate coda to the long Democratic presidential race, and another obstacle to the party's hope to emerge from it with genuine unity. (my emphasis)

Maybe I should be a bit harsher about Witcover's description of the controversy. It wasn't just "the blogosphere", it was virtually the entire press pack that "immediately pounced". In fact, my understanding is that the New York Post first offered up the hostile spin on her remark, and the Obama campaign promoted it by e-mailing it to reporters. As Walsh says:

I couldn't believe this became the weekend's hottest political issue. I couldn't believe Keith Olbermann did a special comment on it (which I really couldn't believe was also widely circulated via e-mail by the Obama campaign). I couldn't believe that only George Stephanopoulos took the time to scrutinize and question the judgment behind the Obama campaign's political use of what was at worst bad phrasing on Clinton's part.

Given the over-the-top trashing that Clinton got from most of our sad excuse for a press core, Witcover's measured description of the thing stands out as an island of decency in a sea of Timmy Russerts.

Tags: democratic party, gene lyons, joan walsh, jules witcover

Which side are you on? Do you even know?

I don't know who it was that first came up with the comment that is attributed to Robert Frost that liberals are so open-minded the refuse to take their own side in a debate. It may be like one of those fake Abraham Lincoln quotes, I don't know. Naturally, the rabid conservatives like to pretend that liberals take their own side so much they want to suppress all others. But that quote, bogus or not, sometimes comes to mind when I read things like this: Is there life after Bush? by Gary Kamiya Salon 02/20/07.

Kamiya does some good political analysis. But it's not evident in this piece. You can almost pick a paragraph at random and see how vapid it is. Writing about those vulgar bloggers, he says:

But having said that, it should also be said that the hate-Bush mind-set can spin out of control, leading to propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos. Faced with a triumphant administration and an army of right-wing media hacks, it's understandable that the left fought back with everything it had. But the obsession with victory can come at a dangerous price. Right now, the left - or at least some elements in the liberal blogosphere - have at times shown a disturbing tendency to close ranks and deny inconvenient truths. It should not still be necessary to point out that in battling a foe, you don't want to turn into him.

He rags on the "liberal" and/or "left" blogosphere - I envy the European publics who at least have some better common idea about who's liberal, conservative or left ("liberal" is not the same as "left" in most democracies in the rest of the world. But he doesn't give a single example of who these foaming-at-the-mouth lefties bloggers are. He gives a link of the phrase "deny inconvenient truths" to an article by Salon editor Joan Walsh, Fighting words 02/16/07. But Walsh's piece is more specifically about the tension that can arise between partisanship and factual reporting, a perfectly legitimate issue, and she is generally respectful to the bloggers she mentions even in criticizing them.

But Kamiya's piece is ditsy. He talks about Bush-haters that certainly exist in the fantasies of David Brooks, who's been beating the drum about this alleged malady for years. Now, when you're using generalities like talking about the dangers of "propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos", who can really argue with the abstract point? But who is he actually talking about? He doesn't say.

But what he does do is echo the same nonsense that, the sad characters who dominate our national "press corps" promote. See, for instance, Think Progress' report, Tony Snow and White House Reporters Slam The ‘Hateful,’ ‘Polarized’ Blogosphere 02/20/07.

Kamiya's piece seems to assume that after Bush and Cheney leave office, that things will revert to the 1970s or something, where you actually still had Republican "moderates" - real live ones, not the Maverick McCain and Chuck Hagel versions - and the bipartisanship so beloved by David Broder and all proper Big Pundits was actually feasible on major issues.

But the Republican Party isn't going to revert to some non-authoritarian form overnight. The Republicans, according to one count I've seen, have a higher percentage of their total Congressional seats coming from the Deep South than the Democrats ever had during the days of the "Solid South". And that Southern Republican base is essentially made up of conservative white people, heavily influenced by Christian Right appeals and policies.

They aren't going to suddenly decide to make nice in January of 2009. We saw how long their phony appeals for "bipartisanship" lasted after last November's elections. So Kamiya's apparent longing for a Broderian era of moderation and reduced partisanship starting in two years is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Tags: bipartisanship, gary kamiya, joan walsh