What Liberals Want: An Interview with Freddie deBoer

There is an interesting debate currently underway within the halls of American liberalism. At least it’s interesting to me. And it seems interesting to a number of other folks who keep stepping up to contribute to and participate in the debate.

For all intents and purposes, the debate is about what is good for American liberalism by way of internal critique of the last eighteen months of the Obama administration. Some say that liberal critics of the President and his administration have “gone too far” and that their constant barrage of complaints is undermining the liberal agenda and the President’s efficacy. Others suggest that this kind of internal hand-to-hand is precisely what needs to take place and that certain of the ideology’s sacred cows are due for slaughter.

At least, those are the two poles of the debate. Opinions lay strewn across the space between them. The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner and The Nation’s Eric Alterman are two of many progressive critics to pen thoughtful and challenges pieces on the Obama administration’s achievements to date. In response, The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn wrote a short piece entitled, What Do Liberals Want from Obama? And a few weeks back, former Clintonite Lanny Davis penned a piece for The Hill warning of the, Progressive threat to the left.

Readers will know where I stand on this issue. But over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking, “I wonder what Freddie has to say about all of this?” Perhaps you’ve wondered the same thing? Perhaps not.

In any event, League alumnus Freddie deBoer’s thoughts on the matter have remained unspoken due to his blogging hiatus. But this need no longer be the case.

Freddie was kind enough to take the time to exchange a few emails with me on the subject as we explore: what liberals want.

Scott: There has been an increasingly heated debate amongst liberals about the President’s achievements over the past 18 months. Some fairly prominent progressive pundits have been openly and in some cases harshly critical of Obama’s legislative record. On the other side of the street, there are liberal pundits who agree with the White House’s assessment that the President and Democrats have been wildly successful and that progressive criticism is misplaced.

As a starting point for the discussion, how do you feel about what President Obama and Democrats have been able to achieve over the past year and a half?

Freddie: A lot of political conversation is taxonomic and over time I’ve really come to wonder if its of any use at all. I just don’t think that there’s any neutral position from which to define a center, so you just get this endless, useless discussion of who is more extreme, or whatever. I do think that it’s necessary to say, though, that I’m significantly to the left of Obama and the vast majority of the Congress. I am a liberal (not a progressive), but that’s usually an inadequate term for describing a member of the socialist left; “liberal” describes a disposition. It’s just usually taken in reference to policy positions. I knew the distance between my preferences, which have no chance of becoming a majority political position within my lifetime, and Obama’s, going into 2008. I did and do find him vastly preferable to the alternative, and I think the pose that there’s no difference between different presidential candidates is usually a position of the privileged. So my answers will all be some version of “he sucks but sucks less,” and my apologies if that’s boring.

As is typical, I have to separate executive power issues, domestic policy and foreign policy. On civil liberties and executive overreach, it’s a disaster, but it isn’t just his disaster. This country has given up on the idea of a limited executive and it is folly to expect any executive, no matter what he or she says on the campaign trail, to walk that back. That’s not to say that you can’t judge a President on his or her individual decisions on these issues, and I think Obama has repeatedly failed to do the right thing with respect to executive power. (Or to honor promises he made on the campaign trail.) So, yeah, he hasn’t done the right thing when it comes to executive overreach, but then, he also hasn’t disappointed me, because I expect no significant restraint on the office of the Presidency until it is constrained by the legislature. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be a political winner, despite the anti-governmental power rhetoric that has come into vogue.

On foreign policy, it’s been somewhat constructive rhetoric paired with status quo action. The status quo in this case being a country with a frankly astonishing preference for the projection of force, a near total rejection of the restrictions of international law, and an absolute contempt for the principles of non-interference and self-determination. Right now, my country has troops in 135 countries. That this isn’t seen as a sign of an absolutely deranged foreign policy is made possible in large part by a reflexive militarism, one that assumes that there is always superior virtue in military solutions, that insists that the citizenry should be deferential to the military, and that aggressively enforces that deference not only in political discourse but in every communal forum we have. (This militarism is actually rather new, although most Americans assume now that it is the truth of life.) Obama has made some commitments to troop reductions in Iraq, and has certainly lowered the rhetoric of interventionism, but it’s very hard to argue that there’s been a great deal of positive progress on the ground.

So, you know, compared to my preferences, he’s an F+. His predecessor was an F minus minues, and the alternative of President McCain and Vice President Palin would have been just as bad, so I’m thankful for that. We appear very unlikely to invade Iran during the Obama administration, although this is in large part because our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan are making it harder to recharge the public’s battery for killing brown people. As every shred of evidence suggests that the Republican party will support literally any military endeavor that is taken half seriously by any small number of politically connected people, on the general principle that any war that you don’t fight in yourself is good, I have to support Democrats. But, look– there will go on being dead American soldiers in the sand in Iraq, and I can find absolutely no one who can offer a compelling argument for what our war aims are in either Iraq or Afghanistan, or demonstrate what possible benefit our continued presence does for the American people. There’s something to be said for the greater moral degenerecy of people who know that a cause is folly but continue to risk other people’s lives for it.

As far as domestic policy goes, obviously the signature issue has been health care, which is a modest improvement on a practically disastrous and morally repugnant system. It’s a constructive step towards fixing a problem which has been an incredible embarrassment to this country. (In America, of course, we demonstrate our commitment to our country by fighting to prevent solutions to its problems, on the theory that if we all pretend we don’t have problems, we won’t. I digress.) It’s also very important to say that getting this thing passed was a huge deal politically, because the American people have a habit of being noncommittal about government programs until they exist, and then defending them with gusto. Of all the commentary that went into the health care debate, the most useless was the constant competition of polls to show what the American people really wanted. Without exception (and I’m including myself in this) commentators think that polls of American preference are valid exactly and perfectly to the degree which those polls confirm their preference. The polling was so confused because the American people are so confused; the American people are and always will be politically incoherent. But I do think that there is a fairly consistent preference for defending status quo government expenditure. (Running hard on repeal of HCR, by the way, is one of the most politically ruinous ideas I can imagine, even in a very positive set of circumstances for Republicans.)

The bill we got is insufficient, and there’s still far too much complication and hassle involved, in large part because of the insistence on maintaining a semblance of “free market” principles– free market, that is, being code for “whatever system gives the greatest advantage to the already moneyed and powerful.” I do think, frankly, that a public option, or whatever you’d want to call it, in a more pure and complete form is inevitable. It’s just never going to come in the front door. You don’t get that kind of policy in America– policy that is sane, practical, and moral, but antithetical to the deference to corporatism– through broad, brash strokes. Instead it comes piecemeal, gradually, in a way that doesn’t invite overheated battle rhetoric, but rather evolves conservatively because its logic and sense become undeniable. I realize that this is exactly the worst thing to say, given the conspiracy mongering that has become the default mode of the American conservative movement, but its also exactly the model for change that conservatives should be embracing.

Of course this all comes in the context of the economic issues which are dominant right now. Sorry to be banal, but the economy and the presidency are weirdly entangled, because the president has very little control over the economy but his reputation is deeply invested in it. There’s little point in getting economic analysis from me. I will merely say that the reflexive deference to corporate power makes really accounting for the economy’s problems difficult. I was watching one of the Sunday morning political talk shows recently and they were discussing how American corporations are making enormous profits, but none of it is getting invested into job creation. What was remarkable was that it was clear that whether what the corporations was doing was responsible or moral wasn’t even broached. It wasn’t that this was a situation where criticizing the companies was inappropriate; it was that the very idea that these corporations should be judged based on their conduct, or that there is such a thing as responsible behavior for a business, was out of bounds. I call that lunacy, but most people in punditry call it maturity. People talk as if this is a uniquely critical moment for business, with the financial crisis and BP, but if this is what our anti-business moment looks like, pardon me, but holy shit. (I was amazed that people were surprised that a member of Congress apologized to BP. Of course, a member of Congress apologized to BP.)

Anyway, that refusal to believe in standards of behavior for businesses and corporations makes having an adequate response difficult. And then there’s the bigger issue, which is that any consideration that there are some inherent structural problems with our basic resource allocation system, and that we have very recent and troubling evidence to suggest this, is considered inherently unserious. But then, I’ve never been very attached to being serious.

Scott: It strikes me that many of the complaints you lodge leading to a rating of “F+” are, in spirit if not written content, precisely the critiques that many of the President’s critics on the left are in the process of presenting. The push back seems to be that by lodging such complaints, “progressives” are characteristically asking for the impossible and thereby actively undermining the President’s achievements and the future efficacy of his presidency.

To what degree do you think that is a fair criticism and to what degree do you think it is a reflexive response of a punditry that sees mounting those critiques as you describe it, “inherently unserious”?

Freddie: Many things to say.

First, I do want to immediately recognize and admit that I have the extremist’s luxury; I don’t have to sully my beliefs with appeal to dirty partisan politics. But that cuts both ways. People say that politics is the art of the possible, but there’s so much insistence on a narrow range of possibility that they winnow away at what we can actually accomplish. Ultimately I have to admit that there are real constraints on political action, but I also have to insist that when you make practicality a chief concern in politics, you’ve effectively undermined democracy.

Also, I do want to make clear that there is a deep gulf between my dissatisfaction with American domestic policy and foreign policy, and accordingly with my opinion of Obama. I’m not happy with American domestic policy and I very likely never will be, but it’s a great deal closer than foreign policy. American foreign policy in the 20th century and in the last several decades in particular has become one long litany of insanity. It’s not just what we do, but how blase we’ve become about what we do; this foreign policy is absolutely radical, but people assume that it’s simply the way things are done and always have been done. Frankly, I think that the most understandable attitude towards our foreign policy– under Clinton, Bush, Obama– is horror and moral revulsion. So it’s not as though my general distaste for our country’s policy prevents me from making distinctions.

I’m out of the loop when it comes to the liberal blogosphere, or the blogosphere in general, really. So I don’t know that I’m the best to critique the current level of criticism from the left on the Obama administration. There are some broad things, though, that I almost never hear.

I don’t think that Obama coming into power has been good for the liberal blogosphere as an entity, although that’s just an inevitable consequence of going from being a dissident voice to the voice of the establishment. Certainly, it hasn’t been the best for a certain class of connected policy wonk. There’s always been a lot of bullshit in the new media narrative. Bloggers simply have not been honest, either in their work or with themselves, about their own position in the media landscape, or about the reality of the media environment in DC. All of the new media narratives have contributed to this bogus denial about the degree to which bloggers represent the establishment, about the degree to which the high school atmosphere of the DC punditocracy dramatically affects the content of what bloggers say, and about what narratives exactly are going to be permissible.

I mean look at a guy like Ezra Klein. I like Klein okay. I think he does some good work. But there’s just an absolute unreality to his pose and the pose of the rest of his crew, and it’s insulting to the intelligence of people who aren’t connected like they are. Are there a dozen more influential journalists than Klein? I doubt it. He’s reached absolutely rarefied air in the world of punditry and journalism, and has been amply rewarded, both monetarily and in the mini-Hollywood sense. Yet there’s this fake guilelessness, this bogus naivete, as if he doesn’t have the ear of some of the most influential and important policy makers on Earth. You see this all the time from him and Yglesias and a few others, this refusal to acknowledge that they aren’t just average Joes at the keyboard anymore. And that has real consequences for how they write and how they act.

I mean look at the Journolist thing. I have absolutely no insider knowledge or anything similar about that whole imbroglio. I’ve never met Dave Weigel and haven’t read much of his work. It seems like he certainly got a raw deal and I feel for him on that level. But you can see the kind of consequences you can have when people refuse to be honest about their position in a deeply competitive, extremely cutthroat world like political journalism and punditry. When has elite political journalism ever not been a vicious shark tank? And you’ve ascended to near the highest levels of that enterprise, and you are surprised to find that people don’t play fair? You honestly think that an email list with 400 names is not going to have some people on it who are jealous of your success and eager to make some waves in the elite pond, even if anonymously? Please. Please. Spare me the fake naivete. It’s really grating. Of course, Weigel should have been able to speak his mind with an assumption of privacy. But should has nothing to do with it, and no one who has gotten to his position or Klein’s position could possibly not know the kind of atmosphere he’s gotten into. It’s a cruel business but it’s one they’ve freely chosen to enter.

What does that have to do with left-wing criticism of Obama? The same sort of bullshitting about the power structures of the blogosphere comes into play. Guys like Yglesias and Klein go a long way towards setting the narrative. I don’t begrudge them that influence, not at all. They’ve worked for it. But pretending like they don’t have it is dangerous. Look at the way Glenn Greenwald is marginalized. He’s punished because he regularly and unapologetically criticizes members of the liberal inner circle. That sends a clear message to all the many wannabes and gonnabes in the liberal blogosphere: you don’t go against la cosa di loro. One of the depressing things about the Internet is that you constantly get front row seats to watching people professionalize, which is almost always a vulgar process– no matter how talented, principled and deserving the individual. In order to make it, people have to be very explicit with their networking, with their panhandling for visibility. Again, I can’t blame them; there’s really no other options if you deeply want to make blogging and online punditry your profession. But it instrumentalizes all of your relationships. And that corrupts, it has to.

Nobody’s obligated to like or defend Greenwald or any other leftist, and they should certainly criticize who they think is worthy of criticism, but I think that there has to be far more accounting for the fact that criticism on the Internet often seems to come in waves. It’s hard not to see coordination. That coordination might not be explicit, but it’s powerful and pervasive. If guys like Klein and Yglesias would just be more upfront, and drop the pretense that they are any less remote or distant than a Woodward or Murdoch, we could have a healthier understanding of it all. But, again– they’re comfortable with the kid-at-a-keyboard pose. They want the influence and success, but they don’t want to be confronted with their own status as figures of the establishment, and as Journolist shows, they really don’t want to be targets in the way that ascending to the top of any status hierarchy ensures.

Still, look– the establishment liberal blogosphere presents an unapologetically moderate liberal voice in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible ten or twelve years ago. It made a big impact on the campaign and it really is a voice that the Obama administration feels it has to placate. I just wish it would take the next step away from the neoliberal corruption that completely undercut American liberalism, convinced liberals that they should be ashamed of their liberalism, destroyed the ability of the United States to stand against the unprecedented failure of the Bush administration, sold out the working class and labor, and continues to insist that the problem with America is, you know, unions, feminists and affirmative action. When conservatives argue, they say, “my position is the really conservative one.” When liberals argue, they often still say, “my position isn’t too liberal, don’t worry.” That’s no way to operate as a major ideological faction, and it’s gutless and empty. To its great credit, the liberal blogosphere has done a lot to change that attitude. But having a President in power that they supported and voted for creates a danger of walking back from that, not through fidelity to neoliberalism but through the desire to be a good team player.

Scott: You talked about the danger of an “insistence on a narrow range of possibility that they winnow away at what we can actually accomplish,” and then later opined that, “I just wish it would take the next step away from the neoliberal corruption that completely undercut American liberalism”.

When we look at these twin concerns, particularly in the case of someone like Glenn Greenwald, as you suggest, but also in terms of folks like Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, David Dayen, Chris Bowers, Duncan Black, Digby, and other members of the “unapologetically liberal” camp, it does sort of seem like there is, as some have suggested, a civil war at play within American liberalism. And if we cast the dynamics at play in that kind of a context, you can sort of see how their critics wind up shaking their heads. After eight years of Bush-Cheney-ism, the “left” has decided to go to war with the good guys. No wonder we can’t get anything done.

As common end point is to suggest that liberal/progressive pundits are simply in a constant and reflexive state of critique that has hardened into habit rather than a thoughtful arm of critical discourse. From that vantage, it would seem as though Obama’s liberal/progressive critics really have gone too far. Especially considering that in the short term such criticism will have a somewhat blunting effect on the ability to build momentum towards achieving important policy victories.

The flip side, of course, is to note, as you have, that American liberalism really has become a neutered ideology and that just this kind of intra-ideological debate is necessary in order to preserve something approaching an effective future liberalism. To what degree do you think this debate is integral to the future health of American liberalism and how would you as someone who some degree of skin in the game go about balancing the long term needs with the short term losses?

Freddie: First, I just don’t agree with the electoral politics angle, although it’s a very common argument. Swing voters are going to note that Jane Hamsher is mad that Obama hasn’t gone far enough towards securing goals of the left and say, “yes, it’s true, the Democrats haven’t moved far enough left– I’m voting for the Republicans”? If the idea is that we will lose centrists by pushing to far too the left, the first question should be “does achieving our basic policy positions conflict with getting these voters?” Because it the answer is yes, then we wish them well and hope they change their minds. The HCR debate demonstrated the absurdity of the Politico mindset: you win elections to enact a policy agenda, not the other way around. People actually advocated scuttling HCR in order to better win elections in the future. Win those elections… for what, exactly, if the legislative aims of those who are elected are constantly curtailed because of the desire to win elections even further in the future? Conservatism, being a reactionary ideology (kudos for Ricochet for having the most honest title on the web, by the way), can get what it wants by failing to enact a positive agenda. We can’t. If actually having legislative success means later electoral failure, then that is a deal you take every time, unless you care more about playing for a team than doing what’s good for the people.

As for the “good guys”– well, let me tell you what was perhaps the most important period for my political and intellectual development. In the runup to the Iraq war, the antiwar left, and even those merely skeptical about the war on the left, were subject to a direct and vicious campaign of marginalization and expulsion from the ranks of the worthy. I would open my web browser every day and read as writer after writer at Slate, The New Republic, The Washington Post and others devoted their considerable influence and access to not merely disagreeing with the anti-war left, but to insisting that the anti-war left be excised from the community of decent liberalism. You can look it up. Peter Beinart’s work essentially called for a culling, a new McCarthyism, to root out those on the broad left who were insufficiently devoted to the cause of American military interventionism. People like Jeff Goldberg were writing, daily, that the antiwar left was objectively pro-fascist. People like Will Saletan were insisting that the anti-war left were more devoted to anti-Americanism than to opposition to totalitarianism. They came out of the woodwork. Completely unexpected people like Salman Rushdie raced to exposed the terrible moral degradation of the antiwar left. And all Iraq cost us was untold carnage, massive human suffering, widespread loss of life, an obscene amount of money, our moral legitimacy, and almost every shred of the world’s goodwill towards us.

Now that’s a particular example, and an extreme one. But it’s illustrative of a recurring element in liberal discourse. And it’s the same dynamic at play when people say “no criticism from the left”. Those are the good guys, as I’ve understood your question. To his great credit, Obama doesn’t appear to be that kind of liberal, or to have any of that in him. Whatever large disagreements I have with him, his character appears to be in the tradition of the great liberal pragmatists, who I have traditionally both celebrated and sighed about. But when I hear people tell me that I have to become soldiers in a cause, when people start insisting that we on the socialist left become team players or get out of Dodge, I have heard it before, and I have never forgotten.

Now, me, I’m not Peter Beinart. I’m not in the business of pushing people off of the good ship American Liberalism. I don’t want to exorcise anybody from the big tent, even people who I find ridiculous, like the Truthers and the Larouchies, or whose opinions I find comically contradictory, like people who think you can both support globalization and oppose illegal immigration, or people whose intent I love but whose methods I deplore, like Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey. Keep them all in. Including Peter Beinart, and Saletan, and Goldberg, and all the rest. We are not the movement police. Those that want to be should be rigorously debated. That includes the members of the socialist left who want to ding everybody for insufficient devotion to the socialist cause. But the Spartacus league has no influence and no power, and the McCarthyist liberals do.

Now, most of the people arguing against left-wing criticism of Obama are doing so fairly and without suggesting that those who do criticize him need to be pushed out of the tent. But that rhetoric, it seems to me, is growing. The HCR debate saw a lot of it. And the fact that there have been absolutely no professional consequences for the most vicious critics of the antiwar left in the runup to Iraq cannot have gone unnoticed. (That TNR and Slate continue to be taken seriously after their roles in the justification of the Iraq invasion– well, I guess it’s merely typical.) The specter of the decent liberal commissar, clucking his tongue as he assumes the superior intellectual seriousness of the man to his right, ridicules anyone who even asks the question about the necessity of structural change, begins his day presuming that his real fight will be with the man to his left, and always, always ready to narrow the community of those worthy of being in the conversation– that will never leave American liberalism, I’m afraid. And in the rush to express sufficient devotion to Obama, I see it. To their credit, many of the wonky, establishmentarian liberal bloggers haven’t gone down that road. But they might; that’s part of the price of success. The pundit world has a short memory. I don’t.

Scott: I’m getting an almost fatalist flavor to your analysis, here. The sense that this kind of marginalizing of a certain subset of voices has always essentially been a part of American liberalism and probably always will be, regardless of what those on the left flank do.

And yet, it seems noticeable that people like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, Eric Alterman and Bob Kuttner don’t seem prepared to sit back and let that dynamic go by unchallenged or just accept that that is the way it is. The kind of primarying that has occurred in the run up to the mid-terms seems a very real and palpable attempt to challenge that orthodoxy and hold members of Congress accountable for actions that liberals/progressive see as counterproductive.

In the case of the Arkansas Democratic race between Blanche Lincoln and Bill Halter, the efforts of liberals/progressives may well have resulted in real policy victories with the creation and maintenance of derivatives reform that is much stronger than anything previously envisioned. There seems to be a concrete, “fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice… we won’t get fooled again,” attitude that has gripped liberals/progressives following the health care reform debate and its outcomes. An understanding that there is never a good time to make this sort of a stand, except perhaps the present.

Of course, some of my potential optimism may be born out of a short sightedness or a little of my wetness behind the ears. Does it appear to you that there is a new determination to push boundaries among liberals/progressives? Or does this all just seem like another turn of the same old merry-go-round?

Freddie: Oh, I don’t mean to be too fatalistic about outcomes, just about the cyclical nature of the process. I mean, you can see something of a tipping point in the evolution of the Democratic Party from the Howard Dean candidacy to the Obama candidacy. I have no doubt that Dean would have lost in 04, but it would have represented an actual challenge to the Bush presidency, a clearly alternative candidate, rather than the weird, incomprehensible Kerry campaign. (It doesn’t help, in American politics, that Kerry looks like a cadaver.) Dean’s supporters were largely determined, by the poohbahs of responsible liberalism, to be naive and impractical. Obama won the nomination and then the presidency. What changed, of course, was the context of the world around the narratives– events, in other words. So your optimism will be confirmed or refuted by what happens. Me, I think military interventionism results in bankrupted and vulnerable powers. I also think that we have a resource allocation system that is deeply ill, and won’t be fixed by Keynesian stimulus or deficit reduction or a few tweaks at the SEC. So perhaps there’s reason to be hopeful that people will change. But then, I have a very dim view of human nature, and induction compels me to predict failure.

What I’m advocating ultimately is just a kind of eternal vigilance about the purge mentality, which crops up a lot. It’s just a call for liberals to keep a wary eye out for the man who says that the man to his left must be kicked out of the tent, and maybe a caution against the assumption of the wisdom necessary to draw lines at all. I have to remind myself, because I’m sure not immune. (Which includes, yes, walking back a bit on Mickey Kaus. Consistency requires that I advocate keeping him in the fold. As I’ve said before, he can be the batshit uncle who lives in the attic of American liberalism.) The difficulty with this sort of thing is that everybody imagines the moment is unique and the consequences too vast to allow certain people to remain in the halls of respectability. Beinart harped on the spirit of 1948 at the time, because he saw that as a time when a righteous purge was undertaken. I don’t think that purge was righteous, actually; I don’t know that there’s anything righteous about the purge mentality ever. But the bigger mistake was in Beinart looking to anti-Communist rhetoric and action in the first place. When you really choose to look for it, it’s striking how much American attitudes continue to be defined by anti-Soviet propaganda, despite the fact that we know very well that such propaganda was willfully distorted on many topics, and (more importantly) that that historical moment has spectacularly little to do with what we’re facing now as a country.

Conservatives seem to have imagined that, because of the continuing salience of these anti-Communist tropes, that there’s some political value in constantly calling Obama a socialist. I wonder if it doesn’t cut the other way for them, though. As terms such as those get bandied about, they tend to lose their capacity to shock. Who could be threatened by socialist Obama, a man who just staked his career on a health care plan brought to you by Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation? The question is whether that permits new room not merely in rhetoric and terms but in policy as well. I suppose time will tell.

Related posts...

• The professional left’s disappointment and ours, too
• The sword of epistemic closure cuts both ways
• President Obama and Progressive Criticism