Progressive Obama

There is quite a bit of buzz around the blogesphere lately with regard to whether or not Obama is really a progressive, really wants progressive policies to be realized and the like. There is Matt Taibi's article in Rolling Stone. Then there are Digby's comments. Matt Yglesias has a response, and Steve Bennen chimes in. There are also comments from a reader at TPM. And follow the links you can get more comments on the comments and so forth.

I haven't much to add to the discussion above on how accurate Matt Taibi's view is or how good Obama's progressive credentials are. But I do have two thoughts to add.

One is that this discussion, it seems to me, confuses two distinct points. If the question is whether or not Obama is truly a progressive and how righteous a progressive he is, I do not know. Should Obama be admired as a great progressive? I have no idea. Is Obama to blame for the difficulty in achieving progressive aims? Hard to tell. Those questions are very difficult to resolve and really are largely a matter of opinion. However, they are also, I believe, not all that important. If, on the other hand, we are interested in the best way to advance Progressive policies then Obama was certainly the best choice in the general election, and I hardly believe a poor choice for the Democratic party. If we are concerned about advancing Progressive policies then supporting Obama is our best choice. I would suggest also that Matt Yglesias's views on how we need to reshape Congress is the next place for progressives to act. At this point, whether or not Obama is as progressive as he promised (and he might well not be), the sticking point is Congress. The fact that we have been counting on Joe Lieberman as a Democrat is a far greater problem than Obama's lack of progressiveness.

The second point that comes to mind with these criticisms of Obama is that Progressives seem intent on continuing the strategy that has a) been pursued steadily for a half-century and b) been a total disaster. The progressive community backed away from supporting Johnson in 1968. They were then disillusioned by his involvement with and commitment to the Viet Nam war. Likewise they were only lukewarm about Humphry due to his connection to that war. They were determined to show the Democratic party that it needed to be true to its progressive ideals. Nixon won the election. The Democratic party responded with McGovern who was crushed. The Democrats did come back with Carter, who in tern failed to live up to our progressive ideals and who met with a liberal challenge from Kennedy. Liberals were unwilling to support a Democratic party that abandoned its progressive ideals. Reagan won the election. Another set of true Democratic progressives and another set of stunning defeats. Then the Democratic party got Clinton elected. Clinton of the DLC and triangulation also did not quite live up to our progressive ideals and so support for Gore was again lukewarm as many liberals were unhappy supporting a candidate that did not truly embrace liberalism. We got George W. Bush. Now, once again, the Democrats have elected a president who may not embrace our ideal. Do we abandon support of him and get, what, Sarah Palin for the love of God.

How clear does it have to be made that we would be better off supporting the candidates we have and use our position to push for yet more liberal candidates in the future. We are not going to transform the nation in a single year, or in a single President's term. We need to push for the liberal policies we can get from the political process we have and then push for more liberal policies in the future.

Another note, when people criticize Obama as a failure for progressives, is our love and support for various liberal and Democratic politicians of the past, now when such support is of no value. There has been an abundance of posts and comments lately, progressives calling for Obama to be more like Johnson. Johnson is well respected and admired now, though in 1968 when such admiration would have been some value to the advancement of Progressive causes, it was scarce to be found. Far more progressives today admire Jimmy Carter as the nation's greatest ex-President than could be induced to vote for him in 1980 when progressive causes might have been advanced by such respect. And, of course, Al Gore is now much admired by progressives who, including large numbers who stayed home, or who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Could we not try, just this once, supporting our guy when such support will be of value.

Why "Liberal" is a term of abuse.

Mark Kleiman Mark Kleiman has a post recounting comments he recieved after a recent lecture he gave. In his words

Then Tuesday night I gave my crime-control pitch at the California Endowment. It was fairly warmly received. But two of the people who came up afterwards to tell me how much they’d liked the talk said something like, “I’m glad they decided not to have some liberal talk about crime.” When I told them that I was an unreconstructed liberal and card-carrying Obamaniac, they were deeply puzzled.

He wonders at this encounter, but I am not nearly so surprised. It is a growing contention of mine that while conservative policies are indeed quite dreadful, horrid really, close on their heels for being dreadful is liberal rhetoric and argument. Liberal policies are, on the whole, quite good, but the arguments we wield, at least those that permeate the public conscientiousness are quite bad. Actually, to be more exact, the leading liberal arguments are often quite mediocre or poor, while much better, liberal arguments are left unstated.

Take crime control and the criminal justice system, for example. I hear often, from liberals, that there is a need to protect the basic rights of the accused, but this is almost invariably presented as a protection for the accused and only for the accused. This is therefore presented as a gift to someone who is accused, that will benefit my neighbors and colleagues only if they are ever accused of a crime, an event that they don't believe will happen. These rights for the accused then come across as a moral obligation my we liberals believe is a moral obligation imposed on my neighbor for the sake of people accused of crimes, the vast majority of whom have, in fact, committed crimes. My neighbor may, therefore be a bit puzzled as to why we have to grant this privilege to these people.

The most persuasive reasons why we need to do this are, oddly, rarely stated, at least in our public arguments. For one thing, the power of the state to prosecute citizens is enormous, and history shows that if that power is not checked then it gets abused. If we grant our magistrates unlimited and unchecked power to prosecute they could then do a much more effective job going after criminals. But they could also, with far less effort to themselves, do a just barely adequate job of going after criminals and use their powers to go after people pointing out their corruption. This later choice is much easier and much more profitable and therefore the one invariable taken. If instead we require that they meet standards of evidence, that they be required to present overwhelming evidence of guilt of an accused defender, they can only accuse someone on the basis of "probable cause" and the other rights of the accused are respected, then our magistrates will need to just go after actual criminals. That is why we want to have these rights respected. If we require the state to respect these rights, then those who do get accused will generally be those who are actually guilty and we will be more secure in the process.

We are also made more secure ourselves, if the state respects the rights of the accused, because it fosters greater faith and confidence in the state and greater willingness to cooperate with police in investigations. By going through the whole process of trial, including the rights of the accused, we make it publicly clear that the state is going after those who are guilty. The rest of us are more likely to be cooperative with such investigations if we have confidence that the state is pursuing people guilty of recognized crimes and not some personal vendetta.

So, in short, the reasons for respecting the rights of the accused include powerful arguments that doing so protects the security of those who do not commit crimes. Indeed, those arguments are sufficient, in themselves, to persuade most everyone that respecting these rights is the correct thing to do. The moral concerns of the fate of the accused, who may indeed be guilty of a monstrous crime, can, and should be, a secondary concern. However, in recent times "liberal" arguments have raised this secondary concern to first place, and left the more significant arguments behind. This, more than anything else, I believe, is the source of "liberal" as a term of abuse.

As I indicated in the first paragraph, I also am coming to believe, that this general tendency for liberals to put weak arguments first and to abandon our strongest arguments is far more wide spread than just the issue of the rights of the accused. More on that in future posts.

Why Adverse to War?

Atrios brings up a good point via a childhood experience, which illustrates a thought I've had. We on the left, for the most part, are quite adverse to war for all the oft discussed reasons, not wanting to kill people or destroy things, all that stuff. But is also the case, that the wingnuts oddly don't seem to understand, that when words are being exchanged, even very harsh words, you can take them back, if later you decide you went to far in what you said. Bullets, however, don't give you that option (with the possible exception of friends of Dick Cheney).

If you get into a quarrel with a neighbor, you might call him all sorts of terrible things, and yet still be able to make up with him if later you discover that he was not so much the source of your injury as you had originally thought. That option is most likely not available, however, if in the course of your quarrel, you shoot him.

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Conservative Columnists

Kevin Drum, along with others, have put in their two cents worth to explain the results of this study by Media Matters. The upshot of the study is that conservative, syndicated columnists outnumber liberal, syndicated columnists at every type of of newspaper, big or small, urban or rural, liberal or conservative. One thing that might add to the explanation that I haven't seen mentioned. Although my views have always been distinctly left of center, when I was younger (in the '70s and '80s, before so much of the major media became crap) I always preferred to read the conservative columnists, George Will, Jack Kilpatrick, William Buckley and the like, as doing so helped to sharpen my own arguments. The conservative arguments were never persuasive to me, but they certainly helped make my own arguments better. I had, and have, an attitude that is particularly suited to the scientific disciplines, and the reality based community, in which one is constantly looking for ways to test one's beliefs and arguments. It seems to me that this point of view is particularly common among liberals and progressives, so it may well be that both sides of the isle have a strong desire to see writers on the right, but only left leaning readers want left leaning writers.