Learn to Enjoy Losing
What was I doing out here ? What was the meaning of this trip ? Was I just roaming around in a drug frenzy of some kind… or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story ?
Who are these people, these faces ? Where do they come from ? They look like caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas… and, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them at 4:30 on a Sunday morning… still humping the American Dream — that vision of the big winner… somehow emerging from the last-minute, pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.
- Twenty.
- We change a twenty.- Thank you.
- Here we go.
- Okay.- Spinning the wheel, spinning the wheel, spinning the wheel. Make me rich. Make me very rich!
- Eee-yo !
- That’s ten.
- Oh, you bastard !- Shit. [ Sighs ]
- Sorry.No, no. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.
Dean, Hamsher, Greenwald, and an assortment of other progressives who have been keenly outspoken about the shortcomings of the Senate reform bill have come under no small amount of fire (albeit relatively friendly fire) from a number of their fellow progressives who see the bill in a “something is better than nothing” frame. As Ed Kilgore astutely notes at The New Republic, the divide here is more than just a matter of sour grapes and constitutes a real and pressing gap in the analysis and vision of the American left — a divide with which that motley coalition will have to deal at a point rapidly achieving a status of sooner rather than later.
So while I would likely fall into line with Erik’s ultimate sentiment of supporting the reform (after everything that has happened, to turn around seems unwise), a part of my heart and thoughts follow along the outraged lines of dissatisfied progressives.
In his recent post, Chris both chastised Hamsher for suggesting that dissenting progressives ought to look to dissenting tea partiers for a potential coalition and suggested that we look to the systemic parameters of legislative horse trading in our search for blame apportionment. I think that Chris is right on both fronts, but that his accuracy on the systemic front ought better blunt the sharpness of his sarcasm on the coalition front. While it might be true that a coalition between dissenting progressives and tea parties is both unlikely and unlikely to result in anything productive, it isn’t that hard to see how Hamsher gets there: both dissenting progressives and tea partiers are pissed off about a system that they see as fundamentally broken and failing to represent the interests of average Americans in much of a meaningful way — though, obviously, for very different reasons respectively.
The differences in their analyses are, I would suggest, enough to keep any serious coalition at bay, but one can sort of see how the spectrum starts to bow at the edges and form a general pool of dissatisfaction. Without psychoanalyzing dissenting progressives too much, I might also suggest that folks like Hamsher are, for all intents and purposes, cognizant of the fact that a real coalition is about as likely as the health care legislation actually being killed, but their frustrated critique is as much a critique of the system that has produced this roundly recognized disappointment of a bill as it is anything, I would speculate. And criticism of the systemic failures of America’s political machinery is hardly a fringe issue.
Indeed, it seems largely unfair to chalk progressive criticism of the current state of health care reform up to ideological temper tantrums, as has been suggested by some quarters, even if their ultimate prescription seems unwise. It is worth bearing in mind that it is progressives who have had the most stripped away from their aspirations for health care reform by, as Krugman noted just the day before Chris linked to him, in the insincere center. To cede ground over honest and principled difference of position is one thing, but to watch the whole process get hijacked by empty suits like Joe Lieberman and Mary Landrieau is entirely different, and understandable, galling ball of wax.
One step further, to watch that whole dog and pony show of dysfunction roll out, express outrage, and then be told be your fellow wayfarers that your outrage is unproductive and that the outcome ought to be seen as a win, worts and all is, admittedly, a not unlike becoming institutionalized into thinking, “No, no. Calm down, Learn to enjoy losing.” There is a point at which one is not simply justified, but, in fact, obligated to react to the condescending lacerations of a schizophrenic system in the grips of denial with unmitigated outrage, to rebel in the Randle Patrick Murphy-esque spirit to the Nurse Ratched-ism of the serious political players (to borrow from another of the generations incisive writers).
The settle for second (or third or fourth or fifth or…) best attitude is, in many ways, anathema to the very elemental components of progressivism. Progressives don’t generally act as the cool negotiators of an abstract process; they are, rather, the moral conscience of the left, the urgent change makers, and those who thumb their nose in the face of so-called conventional wisdom. If the American political arena is not unlike a raucous marketplace of ideas, their voice is often an important warning about excess and access that, if anything, the last eight years has taught us we are wise to heed.
It is odd, then, that we should ask the most ardent of our progressive pundits and players to quieten down now when, in the face of an unpallatable state of dysfunction, outrage might be the only thing capable of righting course. Such outrage might not make for the tepid backdrop against which it is ideal to hang “mission accomplished” banners, but to quote the always over-quoted George Orwell, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
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29 comments
Since there is no bill on its way to President Obama yet I tend to see the bitching on the left as trying to strengthen the support in the House for making the bill sent over from the Senate better.
I’ll live to regret these words but whatever the final bill looks like most progressives will support it.
Scott H. Payne
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Agreed. And in that light, I don’t think that bitching on the left should be written off in the way that it seems largely (or at least partially) popular to do right now. Especially insofar as that bitching points to some pretty significant systemic problems that we (you) would do well to address.
I think that, for a portion of the progressives, it’s about more than trying to influence legislation in the House, it’s about principles. Many on the left are beginning to realize the State is not really interested in much except power and control. For a person who sincerely believes that healthcare should be available to everyone, and corporate/government enmeshment is counterproductive to change and simply protects the status quo of a new Plutocracy, and the real goal is to create something which is fair to everyone, the recent spectacle of politics and corporate rent-seeking and lies and misrepresentation is not the route to accomplish their goals.
People here get tired of my libertarian drum-beating and anti-statist tirades, but within the private realm, in the marketplace of ideas, there exists solutions the progressives could embrace — they simply need to repudiate statism and influence hearts and minds — we have it within us to stand against protected power in order to create an environment where healthcare can be available to everyone who needs it.
This is considered Utopian delusion — but I submit that depending on the State to accomplish these goals in an effective way for long term success is the real Utopian .delusion
Concientious liberals have been conned by the power-mongers of the State, and they’re pissed. They’ve been turned against a capitalist system which could create the wealth for innovative minds and compassionate souls to accomplish their goals — it’s called going directly to the source, and there are enough people to make it happen in the private realm. The State produces nothing.
historystudent
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:31 pm
A good post, Mike. The sentence that stands out most for me: “Concientious liberals have been conned by the power-mongers of the State, and they’re pissed. ” Very perceptive.
mike farmer
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Thanks, H.S.
Murali
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Mike, this seems like something Will Wilkinson would say. Have you seen the light and become liberaltarian?
mike farmer
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:04 pm
No, I’ve always thought that liberals and libertarians, and even some conservatives, have similar goals — it’s just a matter of how to accomplish the goals. If you read Charles Wolfe, you see many libertarian/classical liberal themes — he just has a misguided faith in the State.
mike farmer
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I meant Alan Wolfe
JosephFM
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 pm
For a change, I am with you for most of this.
I think what my inability to jump whole-hog into this (liberaltarinaism, I mean) comes down to is suspicion that absent outside coercion nobody is really interesting in doing what is necessary. Statism is at best a last resort, not a real solution to anything. As for capitalism…well I can’t really see how it’s capable of being anything other than a system for creating massive rent-seeking, wealth-extracting (and only incidentally creating) monstrosities worse than even the state, from which those of us in certain advantaged positions (myself included) can benefit indirectly. Maybe I’m just being narrow-minded though (and you probably include in “capitalism” a lot of stuff I wouldn’t).
Then again, I’m probably already a “powermonger of the State” in your mind, so take that as you will.
I suppose I see things differently than you do, Scott. I see Hamsher, Kos, and Dean not as conscientious objectors to a broken system so much as I see them as purist mediocrities who simply do not get the realities of American politics. We’ve seen this movie before. Progressive activists get angry at “sellout” Dems, vote for the “pure” option that salves their consciences, and we…wind up with George W. Bush as president. Compromises are the name of the game in politics. The question one must ask is, are we better off with this than we would be otherwise. And, while compromised, this health care bill seems pretty good to me. Not everything it could be, but tens of millions of people (particularly poor people) are going to have their lives enhanced greatly. That’s the sort of thing that makes me a liberal. I hate to be the one to evoke G. W. Bush, but this bill really is a binary proposition. You can accept it, or reject it. If you don’t support it, you are helping the Republicans. Regardless of whether or not that is a comfortable proposition, it is a true one. Politics is a zero-sum game. You didn’t see Bill Buckley slamming Reagan’s bipartisan tax cuts as insufficiently conservative in the early 1980s for a good reason: passing them was a huge political and ideological victory that changed the country forever. That it might not have been all Buckley (for example) hoped for did not stop him from saying yes to victory. Establishing the principle of universal care into the law, expanding coverage and subsidies, and eliminating abusive industry practices are all worthwhile objectives. We didn’t win every battle for now, but this is what victory looks like.
I’m at the point where I really don’t think arguing is going to do much good. The kill billers are ignoring Paul Krugman on the merits of this bill, and I’m not nearly as informed as he is on this stuff. But where Scott sees conscientiousness, I see pride. Where he sees commitment, I see immaturity. The fact that this stuff came out of nowhere (okay, mostly out of nowhere) after Lieberman extracted his inevitable concessions makes the whole business fishy to me. I think there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that certain provisions of the bill need to be improved. I have no problem with making those claims forcefully. I do have a problem when progressive activists insist on killing the bill in favor of using the reconciliation process. This is not a strategy. Reconciliation only lasts for five years. It would require resetting the entire process. Its use for an initiative of this size is unprecedented, and the effects would be unpredictable. Nobody–least of all a bunch of generalist bloggers–knows what the results would be. They seem assured that it would be better than what we’d get with the normal process, but there is considerable evidence against that assertion and none in favor. It would be one thing if Moulitsas were getting former Senate parliamentarians to go on record and back him up, but obviously that isn’t happening.
Scott writes: “Progressives don’t generally act as the cool negotiators of an abstract process; they are, rather, the moral conscience of the left, the urgent change makers, and those who thumb their nose in the face of so-called conventional wisdom.” I agree that this is how these activists see themselves. And I would honestly have no problem if a lot of these folks were coming from a constructive place. But I simply don’t believe it. Progressive activists seemed just fine with the bill with a weak public option that’s little better than the federal employees’-style plan that we got, and were just fine with a Medicare buy-in that would have helped nobody below 55. These things wouldn’t really have helped many people very much, but they were the must-have parts for the netroots. It’s ideology, in short, and identity politics running wild. I left the Republican Party years ago largely because of the dominance of ideology over facts and the nonstop use of identity politics to fan grudges. I don’t want to see the Democrats become victims of these things as well.
Bob
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
“I see Hamsher, Kos, and Dean not as conscientious objectors to a broken system so much as I see them as purist mediocrities who simply do not get the realities of American politics.”
Wow, I can accept you do not appreciate their positions or tactics or whatever but attacking their understanding of how American politics works seems silly. Anyone minimally conversant with dog eat dog politics established during the Federalist Era gets the realities of American politics. The technologies used to draw blood and inflict damage are different but the basic need to win at almost any cost, praying that senators be unable to vote, remains the stuff of human nature. I have no doubt that Hamsher and the rest understand this and are playing the game as it is needs to be played.
Scott H. Payne
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:14 am
Lev, Bob takes care of my first point. My second would be around your notion of identity politics. Perhaps we’re operating under different definitions here, but I fail to see how this is a function of identity politics.
I’m going to simply say this:
The bill contains everything the Obama Administration had set out to do. The main pillars are intact (and really stronger than folks had assumed they would be) and crying over the public option seems to either be intentionally misseeing what the intent of reform was, or they’re just wholly incapable of understanding what the main point was.
Bob
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I guess it just depends on how you define public option. Here is Obama speaking of how he see a “public option.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J5v45VDcUM
Get your outrage on, progressives — it`s Christmastime ! That`s what we do!
Good post, Scott. Where the Hamshers of the world really start to lose my respect is when they write post after post making arguments with absolutely no bearing in the facts on the ground. Hamsher in particular has just become this beacon of silliness on the left.
However, I think this does bring up something I’ve been harping on and on about – it’s time to kill the filibuster. The only way any side of any major debate will get a chance to really put their ideas into practice, or to kill the ideas of the other side, is by removing this unnatural obstruction from the legislative process.
Scott H. Payne
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:39 am
I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to Hamsher, I know very little about her and have not, honestly, paid much attention to her before now. She just happens to be in the middle of this firestorm. What would your reaction be if we, rather than focus on Hamsher, turned out attention more squarely to, say, Greenwald and Dean? Are we still just pontificating on silly lefties?
Erik Kain
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:41 am
Yes, honestly. Silly may be a mean term, but I think these folks are acting like starry-eyed children with entirely unrealistic expectations. They should be focusing on killing the filibuster.
Scott H. Payne
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Well, I think your write off is a bit too pat and that without a little principled outrage nothing is likely to change at all (let alone any time soon). “Kill the Bill” is not, obviously, a particularly winning message, but the frustration and anger beneath it is real, and in some senses justified, and ought not to be simply dismissed as “silly”.
Erik Kain
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 am
The outrage itself isn’t silly. The solutions are. And the fact that pretty much everyone on the left saying “kill the bill” are blatantly ignoring all the good stuff it does. This gawker headline says it best.
Scott H. Payne
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:04 am
I remain disinclined to look towards Gawker for my cutting edge political analysis.
But that aside, I think we’re largely in agreement here. I don’t think that killing the Bill is the right step either, but neither do I think that the dismissiveness that much of the dissent over the process that produced it has encountered is particularly useful. It’s not so much that calling people like Glenn Greenwald and Howard Dean (and Jane Hamsher) silly is mean, it is, rather, dismissive, especially as regards the outrage of which they commentary is representative. Insofar as that is the response to progressive dissent, I think it is a wrongheaded approach. One doesn’t need to agree with the solutions to acknowledge the justification of the underlying anger and outrage. And yet, that seems to be the package deal that many folks who are defending the Bill feel compelled to buy into.
Erik Kain
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 am
But that hardly represents the entirety of the reaction to Dean et. al. I don’t know how many top-ten lists were written in response to Hamshers, but they were (including my own) substantive rebuttals. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and others have resorted to data and factual arguments and spent a good deal of time and effort to respond to the critics. Saying that they were simply written off is not true, though you are right that calling them silly might be the wrong approach. I just like calling people silly sometimes. It’s my mean-streak at play.
Scott H. Payne
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:12 am
Fair point.
Bob
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:14 am
E.D. You probably can tell when the snark lamp is burning, but just in case I want to assure no snark this morning.
I’ve always considered you to be a bit starry-eyed, your early post on localism for me were, well Utopian. So accusing someone of being starry-eyed is a bit jolting.
Since the fight over health care is far from over I see nothing wrong with the starry-eyed faction having their say. God knows there are plenty of the realists, Krugman, out there voicing their positions. And in fact the starry-eyed faction must know their vision will not be enacted anytime soon. They just want the final bill to reflect a more progressive position. We are, after all, still making the sausage.
Erik Kain
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:22 am
Hey – I’ve been starry-eyed in the past, no doubt, but I’ve spent a long, long time critiquing that very same starry-eyed-ness. A long time. And does killing the bill really have anything to do with making the sausage?
Bob
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:40 am
1. The bill not be killed in the Senate vote of 2009, set for tomorrow. So all this starry-eyed talk of killing it is just gamesmanship. They are trying to improve the final incarnation. So yes, the sausage making continues.
2. Been away for a bit, just noticed you are now going by Erik, sorry for the old school use of E.D.
Erik Kain
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:42 am
That’s new, Bob. No worries. I think it just works better. Fewer people call me Ed. ;)
Anyways, you’re probably right – but there was a moment when it looked like Sanders or maybe some other lefty might kill the thing. And if it gets pushed too far to the left in the House then it might be dead in the water anyways.
Bob
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
I have serious doubts regarding any health care bill reaching the President. I really can’t see 60 votes in the Senate for a final bill. Will Reid have to use reconciliation?