There has been a strain of defeatism that seems to be running through the left side of the blogosphere following the Brown win in Massachusetts that is reasonably well captured by this Daily Dish reader who says, “I’m done.” To his credit, Andrew Sullivan himself is, despite some pretty persistent gloominess, telling people not to give up,

For what it’s worth, I’m not. And for what it’s worth, I beg you not to be.

With a couple days perspective under his belt, Andrew offers the following analysis (emphasis mine),

My sense is that Obama understands that his core responsibility as president is not being a partisan figure. That’s what he ran against in many ways. And I think he sees all this in terms of eight years. He is gambling on democracy working over time, on the president setting the general direction but allowing the Congress and the public to decide how fast and how specific they want to get. He always said he wanted to be the president of the red states and the blue states. His major problems right now are a) an apoplectic and incoherent opposition that feels it is doing something by randomly harnessing populist frustration in a recession and playing the Rovian politics which is all they know and b) a useless bunch of disorganized morons and cowards who make up the Congressional Democrats.

But he’s still by far the best thing we have going for us. And this struggle has just begun. Politics is not magic; it’s not a one-off event. It’s a process of grueling argument, tussling and debate. And the deeper truth is: many Independents who are ornery right now like Obama. His decency and civility and reason are plain to see. And so this is his moment as well. To be the anchor in a turbulent time and to keep making the arguments for necessary reform.

I’m with Andrew  in terms of rejecting the notion of “politics as magic”, but I can’t help feeling like his own unwavering belief in Obama is, to some degree, underwriting the very, “I’m done” defeatism he begs his readers not to give in to. [Read more →]

Generally, I’m loath to give the Bush administration credit for much of anything, but if there is one thing they got right, it’s in their approach to passing legislation.  President Bush and his advisers realized, correctly, that the partisan make-up of any given vote matters far less than what Beltway insiders normally think.  It doesn’t particularly matter if X piece of legislation has bipartisan support so much as it matters that X piece of legislation is popular.  The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson seems to get this, and makes a strong case for passing partisan legislation:

The rule among politicians in Washington used to be that when the provincials become restless, as they are now, the safest thing to do is run to the center. But as this sour and unsettled summer ends, the political center looks like the white line running down the middle of a busy street — a foolish place to stand and an excellent place to get run over. [...]

It is a core belief of Washington’s political culture that policymaking by compromise — “meeting in the middle” — is the way to gain and keep the support of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center. My problem with this analysis is that so many of the big decisions that have to be made are binary: yes or no. The terrain in the middle consists only of “maybe” or “kind of,” and I see no evidence that the country is in a “maybe” or “kind of” mood.

Of course, the obvious response is that Bush’s method of passing legislation resulted in Republicans losing both houses of Congress and the presidency.  But I’m not sure if that’s actually the case; Republican losses last year and in 2006 had far more to do with the party’s failed policies and its obstinate refusal to change course on Iraq than it did with institutional minutiae and partisan composition of floor votes.  One could easily imagine a scenario in which various pieces of conservative legislation were wildly successful, and voters rewarded the Republicans with continued control of Congress, even if that legislation was completely partisan.

Plainly put, the “center” does not lead the political conversation, the “poles” do.  It’s simply a fact that during the past twenty-plus years of conservative dominance, the “center” reflected the strength of the conservative movement.  Accordingly, if Democrats want to gain and keep the support “of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center,” the answer isn’t to propose mealy-mouthed “centrist” policies and hope that voters understand the underlying differences between that and a more liberal proposal, instead, it’s to move full-on with the most effective legislation possible, which in health care at least, happens to be the most liberal form of the legislation.  After all, Democrats won’t be punished for partisanship, they’ll be punished for failure.

So I’m pretty thoroughly on record around these parts as having a certain distaste for political labels and have a variety of arguments about why to mixed reviews. Over the past while I’ve essentially dropped the argument, seeing it as a losing battle and conceding that there are some useful applications of those labels. But the requests of commenter Michael Drew for some clarification around each of the contributors’ political identity has caused me to revive the topic in my own mind and prompted this post. Ostensibly, Michael (if I may call him by his first name alone) is challenging the site’s assertion that we have contributors from across the political spectrum. Admittedly, we are a little light on the liberal side of the street having lost Kyle Moore a few weeks back, but on the whole I would say that our claim remains true.

Michael has repeatedly called for some kind of bio that outlines each contributors’ political leanings, or at least a post by each contributor similar to the series in which E.D has offered a few posts working out the various kinks in the trajectory of his political identity. I have been toying with posting a similar piece and have written these types of posts before at my older digs, but upon reflection have decided to stick to my guns in telling Michael to read through my various posts if he wants to get a sense of where I stand politically. Michael’s complaint is that he doesn’t have time to read through all of my, let alone every contributors’, posts to get that sense and I don’t frankly begrudge him that response.

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Predictions are a mugs game, and mine are worse than most, so take this with a grain of salt. But I see two likely narratives emerging concerning Arnold Schwarzenegger, neither of which I like.

Schwarzenegger’s golden political image has been tarnished lately by the utter fiscal insolvency of California. Part of this can be explained by the financial crisis, but it’s also the case that there are many endemic problems which Schwarznegger has either failed to address or has helped create. That’s bad news for any politician, of course, but it’s particularly bad when your image is as a cross-ideological technocrat, an open-minded Republican who just gets things done. There was a genuine enthusiasm for Schwarzenegger, and still is, not just as an individual politician– I don’t think he’ll ever be President, constitutional amendment or no– but as an emblem of what Republicans could turn to after the collapse of Bushism. Socially and culturally adaptive (not liberal, exactly), animated by small government rhetoric but amenable to good government impulses as well, and predicated on a basis of competence, I think there’s a lot of appeal to this kind of New Rockefeller Republican. But it all stems from the idea that he/she actually can govern effectively and responsibly. Of all the many damages inflicted on conservatism and the Republican party by the Bush administration, many of the most potent were simple matters of implementation and basic governmental competence. People need evidence to show that the GOP, once the party of a kind of ruthless efficiency, can actually pull it together and govern. When your state is sliding towards financial collapse, that’s made quite difficult.

Anyway, here’s my sad predictions: either Schwarzenegger’s failures to live up to the whole “gets shit done” leg of the New Rockefeller stool will be taken as proof that it’s a dead end for the GOP, as I believe I saw George Will claim on This Week once (can’t find a link, sorry); or Schwarzenegger won’t actually get held to account for the extreme fiduciary mismanagement of California at all, and will coast on reputation. I could be wrong, and this is just a feeling. But I suspect that either Arnold’s image won’t be seriously effected, despite the depths of the problems California faces, and once again image will trump reality in American politics, or the baby will get thrown out with the bathwater, and people will reject this new technocratic Republicanism. There is particular vulnerability to this kind of rejection because these New Rockefeller Republicans are casually considered to be farther left than their mainstream peers, and conservative reformist movements tend to be penalized for being perceived as too liberal.

I don’t know, I guess I just feel that American politics have become so personality driven that we are unable to see the value of given movements beyond the degree to which they are tethered to individual politicians. If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign had been a failure, even in a very close race, I’m quite certain neoliberalism would have emerged emboldened, regardless of the underlying practical realities. I may be wrong to conflate Schwarzenegger with a technocratic conservative revival, but his failures at least give me pause.

As it stands, I think the GOP desperately needs this kind of influence, for the political future; and as American politics is partisan and cyclical, I think the country desperately needs it too. I’d prefer conservatives not take power again, of course, but I’m realistic about it, and as much as conservative and liberal are moving targets, at some point the conservative party will be back in power. Sooner than I’m comfortable with. For the country’s sake, the GOP has to reconnect with the tough, pragmatic wonk side that used to lend so much cachet to the conservative cause.

This is not, however, an endeavor that is independent from ideological recalibration. It’s my belief that part of the reason that Rockefeller Republicans were known as more liberal than their Goldwaterite brethren is not just because of social issues, but because sometimes being a competent legislator or executive means expanding government influence. This is all going to be dependent on your natural ideological impulses, of course. We’ll agree to disagree about the specifics. But I think it is the case that part of being a technocrat is knowing when to say “here, we simply have to have government,” and being able to swallow ideological inclination and let government work. In other words, the emphasis on ability and pragmatics that could save the GOP will come with a certain amount of centrist leaning, not just because of the necessity of building a broad coalition but because getting things done will require the ability to compromise in the direction of good government. I think some of this is caught up in the old idea that conservatives have failed in government because conservatives have to, that you can’t do good running something you’d like to destroy. This argument infuriates a lot of conservatives, and not without cause; it’s often made frivolously. It does, however, have a certain elementary logic to it. I wouldn’t hire a guy who hates baseball to manage my team. The question is going to be one of degree, and in what situations exactly it is prudent for conservative leaders to break towards expanding government when pragmatics and need call for it. I think there is room for this technocratic GOP, and in fact I think that it might be the only method for conservatives to avoid irrelevence through demographics. But it’s got to come first and foremost through actual success in governance, and my suspicion is that such success can only come from a more moderate vision of the use of government. I just don’t see a Grover Norquist-style future for the Republican party that can make good on that level.

But I would say that!

I have to disagree with many of the recent responses to Freddie’s attack on Robert Stacy McCain, namely his use of snark and less than kind words on the subject of Palin-worship, the recent rise in faux-populism, etc. that is ransacking the Republican Party and poisoning modern movement conservatism from within.  Since when are conservatives populists, first of all?  And since when has Palin been anything more than a better-seen-and-not-heard mascot for this faux-populism that elitists such as McCain and Kristol and their lot have used to push their less-than-populist policies?  One could hardly call democracy promotion a populist cause, and yet Palin and her puppeteers spin it as such.   That such “East-Coast Elites” should rally behind this woman signifies either ideological blindness at an unprecedented level, or a rather disingenuous, sardonic approach to politics that deserves little more the snark and derision from its critics.

After all, as Daniel Larison pointed out recently, McCain and the other elitists within the GOP who pushed Palin and still do are “doing more to undermine Middle American interests with [their] shameless Palin-worship than any of [her critics] ever will.” In a sense, Freddie’s “snark” is little more than constructive criticism for the pro-Palin crowd.  Perhaps the base of the Repulbican Party has been reeled in by this Middle America charade, and as such perhaps they aren’t witnessing it with much objectivity, or in much of a position to see with clear eyes what is actually happening to conservative causes.  Someone on the outside, a liberal say, like Freddie, is looking in on the whole sad scene and actually hoping that it stays its course because, quite frankly, this course is one of implosion for the Republican Party.  Rallying behind politicians who exhibit such monumentally abysmal qualifications, such disdain for intellect and experience, and such a general lack of even the most basic understanding of what it even means to be conservative (short of railing against liberals and liberalism) will spell the end for the modern GOP, and perhaps that’s a good thing.  And yet, despite all this, Freddie has the good sportsmanship to warn the opposition of their own foolhardy ways.

So I say snark away, Freddie.  Call it like you see it.  Either it will fall on deaf ears and the GOP will run its course of inexplicable self-destruction, to later re-emerge from the ashes of its own folly, or it will catch on and a better, smarter conservative movement will be born.  I highly doubt any of the Palin crowd will listen, choosing instead to write off any critique of her capabilities and intelligence as an attack on Middle America.  The blind will lead the blind, and the politics of faux-populism (a political strategy only slightly less dangerous and foolish than actual populism) will lead the Republican brand into one defeat after another.  It took such folly to lead the Conservative Party in Britain to the point they’re at now, poised at last to re-introduce themselves to the British political scene, a better, smarter political force than before.

Sure, sometimes beating someone over the head with a blunt object is an unproductive way of getting your point across.  Then again, sometimes nothing will get that point across, so what does it matter?  Perhaps someday when realization finally dawns, McCain and the other Palin-pushers will remember those slings and arrows.  They may not ever admit they were wrong, but they won’t forget that once upon a time someone called them out on all of it, for whatever that’s worth…

Something that is increasingly driving me around the bend is the tendency to make appeals to “the people”. Politicians and pundits do this all the time in trying to argue for a particular point of view they happen to be extolling, as if you can reliably count a broad cross section of individuals as thinking in a certain way at all times on particular class of issues. Appeals to “the people” are supposed to be a justifying buttress to one’s argument by demonstrating that you must be right because most individuals agree with you.

Now, in a democracy it is certainly true that a particular course of action or decision on a certain issue requires legitimizing by demonstrating support from those for whom the decision or course of action will have consequences. But on the face of it, the fact that a certain cross section of people agree with and idea doesn’t mean that a particular idea is a good one. Individuals can and have been known to support bad ideas for a variety of reasons. But my distaste for this type of appeal doesn’t just have to do with undermining a good faith debate on ideas based on the merrit of those ideas. Rather, I find the appeal to be disingenuous in terms of the way it describes the content of the subject at which it is aimed.

Talk about “the people” is, by my lights, on par with reference to the “masses”. When appealing to “the people”, one is doing violence to the individuality that is exhibited by thinking citizens of democracy, and thereby disenfranchising those thinking citizens from the process of determining the direction of their polity. It goes without saying that in a democracy there is no way of homogenizing the beliefs and stances of citizens on issues at any time. Not only does the diversity of views means that it is next to impossible, nor desirable, to realize complete unanimity on any given issue, but individuals will change their views on issues over time. So assuming some kind of static consensus on even the most minor of issues within a certain graft of people is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical tool. But the assumption of consensus as a means of justifying an argument/idea/decision/course of action functions as short cut to actually discussing the issue and inviting individuals to consider all of the nuances on a particular topic to arrive at what they might think to be the correct conclusion. The effect is to have prominent voices and personages essentially dictate to citizens what they will think on a particular issues based usually on some kind of ideological identification. The approach is anathema to democracy in the extreme. [Read more →]

So here’s my dilemma.

Real partisanship, I mean real, nasty, cut-off-the-country’s-nose-to-spite-the-other-side’s-face partisanship, can be fun, as the average college Republican can tell you. But among it’s many, many downsides is the fact that you can’t ever incorporate or learn from the opinions of people on the other side. What’s more, in an atmosphere of strict partisanship, bipartisan support is something to be feared and derided. To the true partisan, after all, pragmatism and righteousness are defined entirely by the distance from the other sides opinion. Someone on the other side agreeing with you isn’t a function of you having a sensible position that makes sense absent of ideology; it’s a sign that you are a bad teammate, that you have been corrupted, that you are secretly on the other side. Like most rhetorical idiocies, hyper-partisanship succeeds mostly in excluding people who would be natural allies to ones cause.

You can see then why I’m loathe to weigh in on this little situation between John Schwenkler and Robert Stacy McCain. John’s a friend, but more importantly, he’s right, and McCain is wrong– not wrong in terms of partisan positioning or ideological content, but simply and entirely wrong about politics, procedure and the best way forward for American conservatism. But, you see, I’m a lefty, your typical latte swirling liberal, and to the people who follow McCain’s line when it comes to partisanship and ideological battle, the fact that I think John is right must mean that McCain is on to something. In the land of the ideological warrior content and argument are really just empty vessels for the important task of sorting out who is on which side. [Read more →]

I feel like Ross is sort of missing the point concerning Matt Yglesias’s post that he quotes. To me, the central point of Matt’s post isn’t that deficits don’t matter in a time of financial crisis and liquidity traps; the point is that, when Republicans aren’t going to play ball no matter what, why not cram a bill full of things Democrats want? By refusing to vote for the stimulus package en masse, the Republicans have cut themselves out of the game. If some number of them would get on board, given the many large concessions that Democrats have made in hopes of enticing them, then they’d have something to bargain with. But by signalling that they were uninterested in compromise, they became an obstacle to work around or run over. If that’s going to be the case either way, why not work to help the liberal cause?

I’m not much of a centrist but it seems to me that this is a useful moderating mechanism in a representative democracy. The more that one side or the other plugs their ears and refuses to compromise, the less incentive there is to include their concerns– or the concerns of their constituents– at all. Of course, this is only useful if your side is in power. And now my side is, and like Yglesias I would like our Democratic leadership to remember that and act accordingly.

A while ago I attempted to wade through some of the differences I noticed between Cultural or Civilization Conservatives, and Fundamentalist Social Conservatives, perhaps because I was worried that too often members of both groups were being labeled erroneously as part of the political Religious Right and wanted to better show how not all religious conservatives are fundamentalists or part of the politically driven “Christianist” movement.

In my initial post I discussed Civilization Conservatives (which I use as synonymously with Cultural Conservatives) who took into account a larger historical and spiritual cultural reality, and Fundamentalists (for my initial purposes, interchangeable with Social Conservatives)  who did not.

Initially, Helen Rittelmeyer took issue with this distinction, claiming that I was painting the wrong picture of many Fundamentalists, many of whom were actually far from the strict, unyielding Christians that I sketched them as, and that there is a certain liberation involved in adhering to dogma, claiming that “this fealty supersedes…private opinions and judgments, and thank God for that; deliver me from the prison of my own subjectivity!”

Now, initially, I glossed over this term – dogma - in my response to Helen.  In that piece I realized my initial argument had fallen victim to gross generalizations, but I didn’t really get to the heart, I think, of the question of dogma vs fundamentalism, perhaps the fatal flaw in my initial argument.  In other words, perhaps my concern with fundamentalism wasn’t misplaced, but rather my use of the term dogma to explain it.

Enter Larison:

The key characteristic of a genuinely fundamentalist mentality is its hostility to complexity, historical context and the possibility of a text being multivalent; fundamentalists are to some extent the terrible simplifiers of rich dogmatic traditions. I assume Kain uses dogmatic here to mean inflexible or uncompromising, but this does not take into account the inherent flexibility and minimalism of dogma. Dogmas are minimal statements that provide correct guidance regarding religious matters, most of which are ultimately mysterious and not fully comprehensible. Given the nature of their subject, they cannot always be exhaustive, but they can nonetheless provide the right guidance and serve as sign-posts to the proper destination of the believer. A fundamentalist is like someone who tries to navigate using a map without ever looking at his surroundings. Someone instructed in a dogmatic tradition will pay attention to those surroundings and understand how to relate the map to those surroundings.

Now, Larison is correct, I used dogma rather flippantly to mean “inflexible or uncompromising” but immediately in Helen’s response (I think) one can see how this lack of specificity, this careless diction, can cause unintended disputes.  It certainly doesn’t further a conversation.  This fits in fairly well with my recent discussion of generalizations, but I think goes a bit further.  First of all, it belies a certain lack of knowledge on my own part regarding religious terminology, which can only call to question my relevance as a commentator on religious questions.

Similarly, when we hear the talking heads and political types upbraiding liberals or chastening Obama for wanting to spread the wealth around one wonders to what degree do they actually understand the economy?  It’s one thing, after all, to point to specific aspects of the bailout, or of a spending policy, or a tax policy, and say, “This is why such and such policy will have a bad outcome” and quite another to merely pull at the heartstrings with words like socialist or terrorist or Christianist even.  Inevitably someone more knowledgeable than the speaker will be able to cast aside this gross generalization for what it is: either an honest mistake born out of a lack of knowledge, or a rhetorical tactic used to instill fear or anger or some other reaction in its intended audience. [Read more →]

Helen Rittlemeyer thinks I’m talking trash about her kind of conservatism.  In a previous post, I wrote:

Often cultural conservatives are also religious, and consider religion to be an integral part of their civilization, but do not necessarily frame their political worldview on a vision of religious infallibility, recognizing along with the gradual changes in culture, also the gradual changes in religious outlook. Essentially, to be truly culturally conservative, one must be able to utilize history as a frame of reference.

To be a religious or fundamentalist conservative, one need only have a dogmatic approach to their particular religion. History, science, philosophy, modernity—all fall by the wayside.

To which Helen responds:

Kain is wrong about dogmatism not so much in the summary he gives as in the picture he paints: the strict Christian who has no interest in testing his ideas against history, science, or logic—the very face of supreme arrogance…

..To offer a counter-definition to Kain’s: A “fundamentalist conservative” is someone who has sworn fealty to a tradition, not because her judgment has led her to believe that it is a generally reliable one, but in response to some glimpse of beauty (or sublimity!) in it. This fealty supersedes her private opinions and judgments, and thank God for that; deliver me from the prison of my own subjectivity! This is not meant to be a comprehensive argument for my version of conservatism (which I will, after this post, never again refer to as “fundamentalist”); all I mean to point out is that, if a curious and adventurous humility is the cardinal virtue of philosophical argument, then E. D. Kain may discover it among the people who, apparently, he least expects to have it.

All of which got me to thinking on the subject of generalizations and stereotypes, of both the stigmatizing and self-aggrandizing variety.  I think generalizations can be quite useful in politics, because the world of political parlay is so complex and so riddled with contradictions and nuance that at some point everything has to be generalized or summarized or blurred out around the edges.  So when I refer to fundamentalists, obviously I am making the error of assumption.  That there are fundamentalists who may fit into the “picture I paint” goes without saying.  For every stereo-type there is someone who fits it perfectly.  But this is often the exception to the rule.

And of course, I was actually trying for specificity here–trying to distinguish one subset from another.  Yet, in doing so, I generalized rather egregiously.

So to take this a bit further, I think I fell into what I’ll term the Christianist Trap, a little rush-to-judgment syndrome that Andrew Sullivan seems to be constantly falling into.  Christianists are Sullivan’s Christian equivalents, or counter-parts, to the better known Islamists.  They are, to Sullivan at least, guilty of the sin of pushing a dogmatic and intolerant Christian agenda into politics, often to the detriment of Separation of Church and State, one of the most important founding principles of this nation’s Constitution, and more specifically in direct opposition to Sullivan’s own gay-rights causes. [Read more →]

by Kyle Moore

(Note: this post is MOSTLY ripped straight from my comments to one of Scott’s earlier posts)

I wanted to make I suppose an emphasis to this great post. Early on you posit that in order for good partisanship to occur, all sides have to do so respecting essentially the multiple facets of an issue, and appreciate what people outside of one’s own ideology can bring to that discussion.

I would like to emphasize a slightly different angle because I think it’s a little more important. You talk about it, but in sort of a roundabout way. Positive partisanship comes from willfully recognizing that one’s own ideology can be wrong. [Read more →]

Professor Joseph Wagner of Colgate University, one of the three professors who most influenced the development of my early political thought, was fond of saying that the venom associated with certain issues was because the opposing parties “are not talking about the same thing.” For example, opponents of Roe v. Wade couch their arguments in terms of defending life, while proponents of Roe v. Wade couch their arguments in terms of defending choice – both important values that almost all of us hold dear.

In so doing, the two sides refuse to address the other side’s arguments. This refusal simultaneously allows the side making the argument to more or less credibly  cast the opposition as “anti-______” (where ____ is a fundamental cultural value shared by almost all), while also permitting the opposition to argue, again credibly, that the arguing side is unconcerned with arguments for the other _______ (where the other _____ is also a fundamental cultural value) and is therefore opposed to ________.   In a way, these attacks wind up not only being credible, but also accurate – in refusing to even address the implications of a policy for value ________, a side effectively casts that value as not only irrelevant to the specific issue at hand, but as completely devoid of consideration as a legitimate value at all. 

As a means of inciting supporters of one side or another to activism, this is terribly effective; as a means of finding an actual answer to the problem or persuading fence-sitters and opponents, it is almost entirely without value.   It also has another effect: by casting each side as fundamentally anti-_______, it calcifies attitudes between the two sides on other issues that involve value _______ but that are otherwise irrelevant to the specific issue already under debate. 

Scott’s exceptional post this morning, about which I cannot say enough good things, along with Kyle’s excellent response, goes a long way towards advancing this more or less self-evident concept to an understanding of “good” versus “bad” forms of partisanship.  Better, I think it hints at a way out of this morass.  It also explains why I’ve come to hold President Obama in a higher regard than the vast majority of politicians I’ve heard in my lifetime. 

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