Category: Progressive Infrastructure

Losing Well

Mike Konczal makes a great point about the value of losing well in the financial regulatory reform fight and setting the table for future fights and wins. The whole post is worth a read, especially in contrast to his critique of how the administration has lost some fights poorly. But this conclusion stands out in its inspirational qualities:

Is the final financial reform bill perfect? No. Is it stronger because of these items? Yes. And what I value the most is that the coalition of financial experts who have a stronger vision of how regulation should work in the financial sector is much more organized that before this crisis hit. We’ll continue to build them for the future, and I hope you’ll help us any way you can.

The Tea Party vs The Netroots

So yesterday a colleague and I were talking about how honestly envious we are of what the GOP base has been able to do this year – run dozens of candidates for statewide and federal office, rack up a decent win rate, and get real conservative movementarians to win major nominations. Contrast this what we’ve done on the netroots over the last six years, with not more than a handful of genuine movement candidates, let alone winners. Frankly it’d be fun to have the sort of wave the right is having now.But I think this is both an obvious analysis and the wrong one. The Tea Party and the Netroots are two very different creatures.First, the Netroots is a progressive, grassroots movement that does not have institutional support from the Democratic Party apparatus (neither nationally nor on the state/local level). The Netroots does not have major Democratic donors stepping towards us with millions of dollars to fund various grassroots entities – neither as astroturf outfits nor genuine movement training houses. The Netroots does not have scores of past failed nominees for Democratic offices, state level party officials, Democratic millionaires, established party activists and corporate donors providing the bulk of our candidates for office. In a word, the Netroots is a genuine grassroots movement defined by the lack of support from the various institutions and iterations of Democratic power.Second, the Tea Party is a conservative movement that includes genuine grassroots activists, alongside (or pushed by) major party leaders (Gingrich, Palin, Armey, Beck, Limbaugh), astroturf organizations (Freedom Works, Tea Party Express), and corporate donors (Koch). The Tea Party candidates have been primarily Republican office holders, party officials, major donors and operatives. It is a both real and astroturfed front for what have been traditional Republican goals (abolishing Department of Education, cutting Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment benefits, reducing taxes on the wealthy). Yes, the candidates have tended to say things bluntly, making them appear more extreme than your average Republican. But this is purely something that arises from a willingness to stop hiding behind the polished messaging of Luntz and Rove-types. It doesn’t represent a new shift of the movement (though, in fairness, the Netroots has always pushed for ideas that were also traditionally Democratic, but never forcefully argued for by elected officials). The Tea Party’s success is almost completely explainable by the degree of support they receive from traditional Republican infrastructure and power bases – solely excluding the NRSC, NRCC, and RGA in some places.Anyway I think there’s a real story to tell about how making assumptions about Tea Party success versus Netroots failure (or dramatically slower rate of success) is wrong. This is not an apples to apples comparison, yet I expect lots of Beltway media types and Republican activists will be trying to imply that it is in order to further the narrative that America is a right-leaning country.Update:In the comments, Tim Jones points out another difference between the Tea Party and Netroots that has substantially helped the Tea Party succeed is they have major support from the mainstream media, including basically  complete allegiance from Fox News and formation based around the comments of a CNBC contributor.

Alterman & 12 Dimensional Chess

At the end of a long, thoughtful and dare I say, Must Read piece in The Nation on the structural hurdles in American politics and the media that prevent a truly progressive presidency from being realized, Eric Alterman writes:

What’s more, one hypothesis—one I’m tempted to share—for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

In effect, Alterman writes twenty some odd pages of thoughtful analysis as to why Obama is and will continue to be a serial compromiser and throws it out the window. Nothing in Alterman’s analysis suggests previously that Obama is forestalling meaningful change to remain electorally safe and then will act boldly once he is a lame duck. And there’s nothing in the Obama administration’s rhetoric in the first year and half of his term, nor the two year campaign which preceded it, wherein Obama has suggested that he’s simply holding fire until he gets past 2012.

Moreover, not only are we not seeing this plan put forth by Obama, there are no predictions that I know of that suggest that between now and January, 2013, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will increase nor that there will be meaningful filibuster reform. In fact, Alterman has already identified filibuster reform as a necessity for political change, while he bemoans that Senate leaders have not gotten behind it. So not only is Obama not out there saying he’s holding fire deliberately, but the congressional landscape he will need to actually open fire is likely to erode from where it was in January, 2009.

Alterman does a tremendous job explaining why realizing progressive change is hard. But it makes absolutely zero sense for any progressive to hold out hope that President Obama is in fact playing twelve dimensional chess and waiting an entire term to do Really Big Progressive Things. Rather than hold out any hope that President Obama will improve his behavior if re-elected, progressives need to focus on (1) improving the political and media landscapes that currently impede change and (2) forcing the Obama administration and Congressional leadership to govern as progressives now.

Uygur: “Shake him off his foundation”

I think Cenk Uygur’s post on Huffington Post today is a really important marker that people who are about the progressive movement and moving the Democratic Party to the left should read. After conceding that Obama is, more than anything else, a cautious politician who will naturally move to the center in any debate, Uygur moves to how the progressive base should be responding.

The next time Obama pushes a corporate agenda, progressives have to knock him upside the head. Deny him. Or as the kids would say, send his shit. And make a big stink out of it. Draw everyone’s attention to how far right Obama is and how out of whack he is with the American people.If that scares you and you start to worry about damaging a Democratic president, you’re never going to win at this game. You’re never going to get the policies you want. They don’t listen to reason, they listen to power.

…

If you don’t move the island, the rest is futile. You have to shift the ground underneath them. And the only way to do that is to create such a strong and aggressive progressive movement that they cannot help but notice it – and respond to it. Move the center and you’ll move Obama. And he’ll move the country. There is no other choice.

I think this is pretty important analysis. Obama isn’t going to move to the left on his own – doing so would mean he’d have to fight with conservative and centrist Democrats to make them do something. He is averse to that sort of action. Instead, he has to be made to understand that the progressive base’s support is plastic and will shift away from him if he continues to ignore it. The surest way of demonstrating this is for progressives to create a space for him to occupy more to the left – to move the Overton Window and create enough space for him to move without having to actually fight for it himself.

Uygur thinks the best place to do this is in the fight for financial regulation and I think he’s right. The added bonus is that beyond the Democratic Party being to the left of Obama on it, the entire country is already substantially supportive of serious regulation of Wall Street.  There will be real opportunities here; hopefully leaders on the left seize them and try to force Obama to the left for the good of the country and his presidency.

Cruickshank on the White House & Movement Building

Robert Cruickshank, who does incredible work as the Courage Campaign’s policy director, has a must-read post at The Seminal on FireDogLake. Here is a large excerpt:

The collapse of support for the bill reveals a deeper and growing divide, an unwillingness of most Americans to embrace a flawed process. In particular, progressives – activists and voters – need a clear, signal victory in order to avoid complete 1994-style demoralization. Something big and bold, something clearly progressive that forced moderates and conservatives to concede something important, something that will give more people a reason to rally to Obama’s defense when he is in a difficult place.

Comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of the Grijalva proposal would achieve this. Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would achieve this (and repeal of DOMA would be a grand slam). Firing Geithner and Summers would achieve this. Breaking up some of the big banks would achieve this. And yes, a public option of some kind would have achieved this.

Instead we have a White House and a Senate Democratic leadership that still believes we live in the 1990s, where the “left” is weak and has little popular support. They’ve not understood the transformative effect of the 2000s and Bush in particular, who helped create a genuine American left with real and widespread popular support for the first time in 40 years.

The White House does not view progressives as equal partners, as people who have legitimate concerns and priorities that need to be included in any deal. They still take the Clintonian view that the “left” can be appeased either through a few nice words in a speech, and if that fails, can be crammed down by being told they’re wreckers, being told this is the best progressives can get, being told that progressives are irrelevant (even while the WH’s defensive actions show they’re anything but irrelevant).

The White House hasn’t yet grasped that some basic and timeless rules of politics still apply: that you have to deliver something to your supporters to keep them on board. Something that excites them, something that gets them motivated. Ever since 1993 Democratic presidential Administrations have assumed those rules are in abeyance, where supporters will stay on board out of fear of Republicans, unwilling to act on their beliefs or frustrations out of an internalized belief that America is a conservative place hostile to progressive values.

The Bush years destroyed those internalized frustrations. Congressional Democratic support for the Iraq War destroyed what existed of progressive acceptance of that Clintonite strategy, and freed the left to actually feel confident in asserting its own values regardless of what the Democratic leadership says, because any trust in that leadership was destroyed in 2002. Obama understood this out of necessity during the primary, when he had to embrace this to defeat Hillary Clinton. But once that was achieved, he went right back to the old Bill Clinton strategy of appeasing the center-right and assuming progressives would simply go along with it – and once elected, Obama surrounded himself with old Clinton hands who espoused the same basic view of politics.

Powerful stuff. But I think the most important piece of writing by Cruickshank comes at the end, where he echoes a sentiment that I have been writing about here for the last few weeks:

Until he sees progressives as genuine partners, Obama will face declining political fortunes. That’s his problem, something he and his team should and eventually will address. For our part, progressives should concern ourselves with how to further build up our own institutions and power, instead of wasting time trying to prop up a weak president who views us and our views and our work with contempt.

The added bonus to focusing on building progressive infrastructure and power is that doing so makes it harder for the progressive base to be rolled by the  party establishment in the future. We will be better suited to affect our goals and make sure that elected officials do not turn their backs on the base after our donations, volunteerism, and writing help carry them into office. And, eventually, this infrastructure building, along with internal leadership cultivation, will bring us to a point where the progressive online movement can regularly and successfully field our own candidates for often and stop projecting our values onto people who do not share them.

“Inequality of Accountability”

Chris Hayes of The Nation has an excellent piece on the rightwing assault on ACORN, aided by the United States Congress. He closes with these powerful lines:

The disparity in the treatment of Blackwater et al. and ACORN is part of a larger American problem, what might be called the Inequality of Accountability. We diligently apply the principle of accountability to the poor and the powerless, and the principle of forgiveness to the wealthy and powerful.

Even before it was punked by a couple of right-wing twenty-somethings, nobody knew that better than ACORN.

After all, their members see it every day.