Well, as everybody knew he would, Biden is selecting a cabinet of Obama retreads sprinkled with token minorities, while he talks about reaching across the aisle to work productively with his old buddies in the Republican Senate caucus.Nobody should be surprised about this. It is why he was not at the top of our list of preferred candidates during the primaries. It may be that as a consequence of the pandemic and the strength of white privilege anxiety In broad swaths of the electorate, he is the only candidate who could actually have defeated Trump, but we will never know and now he is what we have.
What must we do? The answer is obvious, albeit depressing. First we do whatever we can to help Stacy Abrams in Georgia.Then we throw all of our support behind progressive Democrats in Congress and in state and local government while also supporting progressive nongovernmental organizations with money and with our time and effort if that is possible for us (as it no longer is, alas, for me.)
As I indicated the day before yesterday, the accident of when I was born and grew up gave me an irrational optimism about the possibility for progressive politics in America and since I seem to be a slow learner, it is taken me 40 years to realize the weakness of the foundations of that optimism. But we have no choice. Not for us the poetic exclamation "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven."
12 comments:
Biden is a centrist, and that’s who we voted for. His major virtue is that he is not Trump. It’s important not to lose sight of that crucial fact.
A democracy will always be governed from near the center. Apart from unusual circumstances, that’s the only way to get a majority. The key, I believe, is to move the center to the left. Republicans, particularly with Reagan, moved it far to the right. The Democrats finally won after 12 years—after failing with Mondale and Dukakis—with Bill Clinton. (Clinton’s crime and welfare “reforms” were Reaganesque, but his health care policy certainly was not.)
What we must not do is go after centrist Democrats from red or purple districts or states. The Democrats need the Manchins of this world to control both the House and the Senate.
Helping Stacy Adams is indeed a good example of what we need to do immediately, but we also need to work on the state and local level. That’s where so much of the action is: where abortion laws are passed; where gun control is an issue; where creationism relentlessly proposed, and bible reading authorized. While Trump was going down to defeat, the Democrats managed to lose seven state legislative bodies. The Republicans now control 61 of the 99, and that doesn’t bode well for redistricting. (Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral).
Thanks largely to Bernie, the center of national politics has moved. There’s even a good chance that a public option will succeed in the next Congress even if the Democrats don’t win both Georgia seats. That would hinge on people like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. We’re a long way from the time when Obama couldn’t get a public option even with 60 Democrats in the Senate. The task is to keep pushing the center to the left.
After Georgia is decided—however it’s decided—we need to turn to the state level. The most practical way to do that for someone like me (who lives in DC, not a state) is to contribute to the DLCC, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. The big bucks go to presidential and senatorial campaigns, and increasingly to House campaigns. Democratic state legislative candidates are pretty much orphans in the fund-raising world. Local car dealers and the like are big contributors to Republican legislative candidates, but there are few if any big Democratic contributors.
As I've been told a wise woman once said, "Well, most people do most things the way they do most other things."
Biden, being Biden, will always place himself firmly in the middle spot of whatever "the Democratic party" happens to be. If it moves left, he will move left; if it move right, he will move right. But he will never be on the leading (or the receding, or whatever the word for the opposite would be) edge. Shift the range of possibilities and he will shift with it. I always want to suggest to those on the left who clench their fists at the thought of Biden that they're missing an opportunity. But there's reason to think that for a good number of them actual policy is not their motivation.
Back in the 1970s, I was a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. We sometimes attended sessions of the Lege (Legislature in American English), because they were simultaneously free, entertaining, and terrifying, as Molly Ivans explained every two weeks in the pages of the Texas Observer (which she edited and to which I have subscribed for 50 years come January). Progressives became known as "kamikaze liberals" because they preferred to be correct to enacting legislation that would incrementally move Texas into the modern era of civil rights, equality under the law and other ideas still considered radical back then by the remnants of massive resistance in the Lege. AOC and other progressives are today's kamikaze liberals. They have no idea what it takes for a progressive like Rep. Lloyd Doggett to succeed in Texas and get re-elected to the House for decades. A thought experiment: Imagine the seminar on legislating that the Master of Senate would conduct for today's kamikaze liberals.
Larry McCullough,
Here, here. I agree with everything you have written. The so-called modern progressive liberals will insist on the perfect being the enemy of the good, until they wind up with nothing.
What was it about Hume's skepticism that Kant found so objectionable? Was it that Hume claimed that synthetic a priori knowledge was impossible and we needed it? If so why do we need it? Or that we actually have synthetic a priori knowledge and Hume was just wrong? Works its way into every discussion about everything. Sorry.
Larry McCullough,
While I agree with your point in general, I just don't think you are right with regards to many of the modern day progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez. While Ocasio-Cortez does challenge moderate Democratic incumbents, she makes a point to primary target solidly blue districts (such as when she helped to oust Engels in New York). She has also helped moderate Democrats in swing states (for example, Underwood in Illinois and Hill in California, before that scandal).
I find this criticism of Ocasio-Cortez frustrating because it just a blanket type of criticism that always comes to the left from the center, even if it does not line up with the facts. There's just a lazy narrative that the center is "practical" while the left isn't. But of course, how practical you are depends mostly on how well you understand political reality. As far as I can tell, moderate Democrats are the ones lost in pipe dreams these days, thinking that you can "reach across the aisle," or that they won't be called socialists and Marxists as long as they nominate Biden, or that they can get all the mythical "good" Republicans to vote for them.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't compromise, or do whatever it takes, in order to get the best policies that are realistically within reach. But I don't think the moderate Democrats are doing that right now.
Anonymous,
I'm very impressed with AOC. She is very shrewd in how she operates. She does seem to be hunting for moderates in strongly blue districts, and that's fine with me. At the same time she shows an appreciation for the realities of
majoritarian politics. I recall her telling some on the left to calm down over Biden's perceived short-comings, that the first task was to get rid of Trump.
David Palmeter,
I absolutely agree. When she first came on the scene, I thought of her just as a flash-in-pan idealist who I would admire but eventually forget about. But she is clearly more than that. Now if only the Democratic Party as a whole would realize this, and recognize their talent when it falls in their laps.
Much of the sentiment expressef in the comments strikes me as coming from the economically content.
These days, to be a "moderate" is to be a radical. This society will not be able to tolerate much longer the strain of "centrist" anti politics that throws a crumb to the bottom 90% once a decade, if even. The neoliberal Dems, even with most of the corporate propaganda apparatuss behind them (NYT, Washington post, etc.), were barely able to contain a incompetent fascist like Trump.
It strikes me as a radical form of unorigional arrogance to think that being a moderate is being a "realist".
The "Radically moderate" democrats are perfectly exemplified by David Sedariss recent joking about "Citizens Dissmissal".
henry,
I suppose I am among the economically content, but I haven't always been and I very much want the country to move to the left. The question is how to do that. You refer to the bottom 90%. If they would only vote for the candidates whose programs would alleviate their problems--health care, minimum wage, unemployment benefits, education etc. -- we wouldn't be having this discussion. The problem is they not only vote for Trump, if they vote at all, but also for House and Senate candidates who promise to save them from "socialism." In this last election, the Democrats lost seats in the House, did not have a "blue tsunami" in the Senate, and lost seven state legislative bodies. Only about 25% of the adult population calls itself "liberal," and that is to the right of most of us commenters on this blog. The question is, in view of this, what should we do?
You’re all a bunch of grumpy people. All you need to change the law for the better is find someone like Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde II.” Stop complaining and start wearing pink.
Ah, Wordsworth, wonderful Wordsworth. “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind[.]”
And then there’s Longfellow: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will, [a]nd the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
And for solace in the recognition that misery loves company, there is Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavor end?
…
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”
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