Rebutting the Ideological Purity Argument

I strongly agree with both Bob Herbert and Glenn Greenwald, who successfully endeavor to rebut the sophistical argument against progressives who aren’t supportive of the current health care bill as arriving at that position solely or primarily out of a quest for ideological purity.

Herbert and Greenwald both focus their argument on the fact that the Senate’s excise tax, which is marketed as a tax on “Cadillac” plans, is in fact a tax which predominantly will hit lower-middle and middle class workers. Herbert cites the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation as predicting this will affect 20% of households with incomes of $50,000-75,000. As Marcy Wheeler frequently notes, it’s not a Cadillac tax — it’s a Chevy tax and it’s aimed at the backbone of the American middle class, particularly union members.

I believe there are many good arguments to be made in favor of passing a health care reform bill like the one that will likely come out of whatever process is used to merge the Senate and House bills. But pretending that there are no good faith, logical, substantive, or non-ideological reasons to oppose the bill is incredibly dishonest. Hopefully those who are publicly supporting whatever legislation comes forward will take Herbert and Greenwald’s pieces to heart and stop pushing the canard that parts of the Left, particularly the online progressive movement, is only opposing the Senate bill because they are pursuing ideological purity within the Democratic Party.

Weak Sauce

New York Times columnist and frequent Chinese government apologist Nick Kristof has only mustered this Tweet in response to the jailing of Liu Xiaobo for advocating democracy in China.

@NickKristof The great Liu Xiaobo sentenced to 11 yrs by Chinese govt. For shame, Beijing.

Kristof’s column ran today. It was not on the Liu Xiaobo sentencing. He has not had any other blog posts nor tweets regarding the Beijing regimes jailing of Liu for a thought crime.

I’ll be curious to see if Kristof uses his large microphone of the New York Times’ opinion page to condemn the Chinese government for jailing Liu. I don’t expect he will and his silence should be yet another black mark upon his reputation.

Havel on Obama, China & Tibet

The Wall Street Journal has an interview of former Czech president and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Vaclav Havel. In it Havel speaks about Obama’s handling of China and the Dalai Lama and the elemental mistakes he is making in his policy towards Tibet and appeasement of China. After comparing Obama’s early dealings with China to French prime minister (and Munich architect) Edouard Daladier, he talks about his own efforts to outreach to the Dalai Lama and China’s response.

Politics . . . means, every day making some compromises, and to choose between one evil and another evil, and to decide which is bigger and which is smaller. But sometimes, some of these compromises could be very dangerous because it could be the beginning of the road of making a lot of other compromises, which are results of the first one, and there are very dangerous compromises. And it’s necessary, I think, to have the feeling which compromise is possible to do and which, could be, maybe, after ten years, could be somehow very dangerous.

I will illustrate this with my own experience. Two days after I was elected president, I invited the Dalai Lama to visit. I was the first head of the state who invited him in this way, directly. And everybody was saying that it was a terribly dangerous act and issued their disapproving statements and expressions. But it was a ritual matter. Later, the Chinese deputy prime minister and the foreign minister came for a visit and brought me a pile of books about the Dalai Lama and some governmental documents about what good care they have taken of Tibet, and so on. They were propagandist, fabricated books, but he felt the need to explain something to me.

I had a press conference with this minister of foreign affairs. And he said, “It was wonderful, meeting, because we were speaking openly. Mr. Havel gave me his opinion, and I explained the opinion of our government. I gave him this book, and he thanked me for it.”

This was unbelievable! Why did they feel the need to explain their point of view to the leader of such a small nation? Because they respect it when someone is standing his ground, when someone is not afraid of them. When someone soils his pants prematurely, then they do not respect you more for it. [Emphasis added]

Havel is right to criticize Obama’s tepid behavior when it comes to China and Tibet. He and Secretary of State Clinton have both tacked towards appeasing China with regard to Tibet and human rights, while extracting no concessions in return. Rather than standing their ground — the ground of America’s respect for human rights, freedom and democracy — Obama and Clinton have shown their fear of China and negotiated with themselves. Not shockingly, China has not budged an inch. Havel is a smart enough person and accomplished enough world leader that when he says Obama has “soil[ed] his pants prematurely,” listeners should pay attention. Havel knows what he is talking about and his critique should cause thoughtful reflection within the Obama White House and at Foggy Bottom.

China: Liu Xiabo Sentenced to 11 Years for Thought Crimes

Leading Chinese political dissident Liu Xiaobo was sentenced by the Chinese government to 11 years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power”; additionally Liu is banned from speaking or writing about politics at all for two years. Liu is one of China’s most high profile advocates of free speech and democracy. He was on trial for his role as a leading author of Charter 08, a courageous document released a year ago calling for the end to one-party rule and other liberalizing political reforms. It was signed by thousands of leading dissidents and intellectuals inside China, including Tibet’s most vocal advocate for freedom from inside Tibet, Woeser.

The jailing of Liu for a thought crime is yet another sign that economic growth and access by western multinational corporations has not liberalized the Chinese Communist Party nor sped realization democracy within China.

The State Department has a standard, milquetoast statement out, but nothing from Secretary of State Clinton nor President Obama. Human rights hasn’t been high on the agenda for the online progressive movement this past year, but Clinton & Obama’s handling of China when it comes to human rights has been one of the biggest disappointments during the first year of the administration for me personally.

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.

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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.

Finally

The Senate is set to vote on final passage of the health care bill, which should pass with something less than 60 votes. Separate from everything else, I’m glad that this is finally happening. A step in a long, long process…and hopefully one that doesn’t represent the final product of the health care bill.

Where Should Progressives Be on the Senate Bill?

Roger Hickey of Campaign for America’s Future, a leading progressive policy and advocacy organization, has what I think is one of the best arguments in favor of progressives supporting health care reform legislation. Unlike many people urging progressives to support the legislation despite its shortcomings, Hickey is respectful and acknowledges the validity of criticism from the left.

So President Obama can celebrate his victory and momentum, but he had better not pretend this legislation is all the health fix we need. A better way to frame it would be to talk about a first step. (Or Sen. Harkin’s image of a “starter house” that can be added onto.) President Obama – and our growing movement – should take credit for getting us here and then declare that we will monitor the performance of the insurance and drug companies carefully, enforcing regulations and strengthening them when necessary. Already, progressives are campaigning for new laws to force drug companies to lower their prices through competition – far beyond the Senate or House health reform acts.

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Our movement should see this health care act as just one step toward real health reform.

I’m not 100% sold that looking at this legislation as a first step is necessarily the right way to think. There will be immediate efforts by the GOP to roll back these reforms and since many won’t take affect until 2012 and beyond, they will have a couple bites at the apple. It’s hard to imagine that there will be many steps taken in the right direction between now and 2014. While Hickey may be right to assert this as the beginning of a policy process, I’m not sure politics will allow it to progress in a linear path towards improvement.

That said, treating health care reform as a movement does make sense. To do so requires long-term vision and seeing how you get from here to there. Hickey is right that this is a big first step, it’s just an outstanding question of whether a movement can emerge to take the subsequent, necessary steps.

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.

Interesting Trend

Jake McIntyre has a post on Daily Kos in which he points out that parallels between supporting the Iraq war and supporting health care reform as it stands now:

Has anyone else noticed that the split in the progressive blogosphere between those who are saying “it’s a good bill in spite of everything” (Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, to name a few) and those who just can’t bring themselves to support Liebercare (Markos and Digby come to mind, among bloggers who have been at it since 2003*) is eerily similar to the split between those who grudgingly backed the invasion of Iraq and those who fought against the war seven years ago?

I’m not sure that Jake is being totally fair, but the point is certainly persuasive and he makes it well.

The challenge, to me, is where the third category of people fit in. I would include myself and Chris Bowers in this group and think of it as a sober activist set (which isn’t to say that other activist bloggers are not sober, but that we see less room for any positive political outcome for progressives). Bowers writes:

If you oppose the bill at least partially because you believe it will result in negative political consequences for Democrats, well, you are probably correct in that assessment.  However, don’t delude yourself into thinking that defeating it somehow makes for a better political outcome.  It won’t, because there is no good political outcome at this point.

My main difference with Chris is that while the political outcomes may not look great, there is certainly still room for movement building through organizing around health care. This can take the form of trying to stop bad parts of the legislation, or simultaneously include efforts to strengthen the bill through improvements. The act of organizing around this high profile issue, building coalitions between advocacy groups, online progressives, and progressives in elected office is valuable and potentially something that can lead to sustainable  movement growth. This sort of movement building is what can be the breakwall that stops political damage from this fight reaching too far into the future.

It’s a complex case and the lack of clear paths to a positive outcome certainly speaks to how poorly the last year has been handled by leadership. I can’t imagine the next number of days and weeks is going to be a fun time to be a progressive activist. But maybe what comes out of this will be salvageable, either as a particular piece of policy or as the movement on whole.