Just admit you’re wrong and shut up about progressivism

The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The Real Progressives

URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT prepare to repel boarders at ZC…

Under fire from land, sea, air, and sub-ether… perimeters holding overall, infiltrators captured and being held for enhanced interrogation, ammo in good supply… exchanges with JED begin here… expect update and resumption of offensive operations by 1800 PST at latest…

OUT

1800 – SITREP

CK here.  It’s quiet… too qu

1952 – SITREP

Intense exchange of fire, perimeter intact, situation stable…

Provisions low… will report after attempt to re-supply…

Today’s picture shows the Statue of Freedom, on top of the US Capitol Dome. The men are doing repair work.

Old Picture of the Day: Statue of Freedom.

This view parallels that of Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that the wealth and security created by the free market would create a citizenry so risk averse that they would proceed to regulate out of existence the culture of risk-taking that made that wealth and security possible in the first place. Whether one sees Progressivism as saving capitalism from the revolutionary tendencies it has fostered, or as a kind of conservatism produced by the beneficiaries of capitalism themselves, the view put forward by Beck, that Progressivism has been foisted upon us by a secretive and arrogant elite would have to be substantially modified.

Gerson identifies those he calls the “undoers”: those (he names Beck and Ron Paul) who would “Undo the expansive American global commitments that proceeded from World War II and the Cold War. Undo progressive-era economic regulations. Undo the executive power grab that preserved the union. Undo it all — until America is left with a government appropriate to an isolated, 18th-century farming republic.” He goes on: “This is a proposal for time travel, not a policy agenda. The federal government could not shed these accumulated responsibilities without massive suffering and global instability — a decidedly radical, unconservative approach to governing.” This very productively puts the issue on the table, and helps those of us debating the WOP provide a pragmatic definition of the thing: Progressivism is all of those “accumulated responsibilities” of government, undertaken in order to shield us from the irrationalities, inequalities, and insecurities brought about by capitalism. (Note that this definition implies that there is no Progressivist desire to do away with capitalism itself.)

If Gerson is right about capitalism, then he is right about the WOP—it is quixotic and destructive to the extent that it succeeds. And if he is wrong about capitalism, one would need a different account of capitalism, to some extent counter-factual (the kind of “time travel” historians often engage in, indeed must engage in if history is not to look “inevitable”), which considers the way in which new forms of free association might have emerged to address widely and deeply felt discontents as capitalism became “big” towards the end of the 19th century. Such speculations might come into their own today, because we now have to consider the possibility that regardless of whether we want the state to take care of our retirements and environment, to bolster our relatively weak bargaining position with our employers, to license and regulate safety, and so on—we may be past the point where the state, even staffed by people far better-intentioned than those placed there today, can simply no longer do so, at least not without creating even more destructive unintended consequences than those dangers it prevents or minimizes.

Gerson says there is only an “interesting ideological” debate over these questions today: placing those who question Progressivism as a whole on the ½ of 1% fringe, he presents “reform conservatism” as the only alternative. And yet he seems worried. TR, the good example of reform conservatism, is also the bad example of party splitting, even “treason.” But if that ½ of 1% can pose such a threat, there must be lots of positions intermediary to the TR one and the Beck/Paul one. Gerson doesn’t consider that Paul’s fringe position might be attributable to other features of his politics: his views on foreign policy, which are indistinguishable from many on the far left (if we have enemies out there, it is our fault for provoking them), and the gathering of various cranks (anti-semites, 9/11 Truthers, etc.) around his campaign—rather than, say, his views on the Fed and sound money. (It may very well be that, statistically speaking, those views are “fringe” as well. They can be aired openly and discussed reasonably, though, without accusing opponents of being tools of the system, and we don’t know what the effects of such publicity might be.)

All the ferment among conservatives today is in that intermediate zone Gerson would rather not name, much less explore. Everything Gerson names, and a lot that he doesn’t, as a permanent and unquestionable feature of our political culture is, in fact highly questionable: regulations, from safety to financial are of dubious effectiveness and contain all kinds of hidden costs; labor laws protect union rackets far more than, indeed often against, more industrious and marginalized workers; notions of privatizing social security and medicare presuppose what no one does any more, a reliable financial system and stock market, and so on. In other words, it might be Gerson who is time traveling—only back to 1996-2006 or so, but that period may already be very distant.

The only way ahead will be to intensify the ideological debate and (maybe this is a kind of reform conservatism) try to channel it within political debates as openly and inclusively as possible—through Republican primaries and (thanks to the latest Supreme court decision on corporate political spending) the participation of a wide range of political groups in framing the meaning of political campaigns. Gerson brings these debates back to sacred ground when he says “Real, hairy-chested libertarians pin the blame on Abraham Lincoln, who centralized federal power at the expense of the states to pursue an unnecessary war — a view that Ron Paul, the winner of the CPAC straw poll, has endorsed,” and goes on: “Lincoln doesn’t need defenders against accusations of tyranny — the mere charge is enough to diagnose some sad ideological disorder.” I’m a lot closer to Gerson than to Paul here—I doubt there is anyone who defends Lincoln’s political thinking and action more fiercely than me (well, there is Harry Jaffa, who also knows it better than anyone). But Lincoln’s sacred name will be sullied as well, as the debate goes to the root of things, and, we should be forewarned, will resist attempts to channel it in ways I just suggested. There may be cause to hope, though, that investing in the debate itself, as it will inevitably emerge out of the Tea Party movement, will serve as a kind of refounding.

What we will really need to look for is the emergence of new forms of conservative civil disobedience. It is easy enough to imagine that if the Democrats are able to get their health care bill passed there will be plenty of people willing (depending upon the final version) to make a point about going to jail rather than buy insurance they don’t want; beyond the health care bill, it may not be long before we can expect people to practice various forms of tax evasion out in the open, daring the government to arrest otherwise law-abiding individuals, or even set up local forms of currency in defiance of the government, and who can tell what else. Even if the Democrats are swept out of power over the next couple of years the Republicans will be distrusted, and thinking along these lines may even intensify. And then they will no longer be mere ideological debates—but they will certainly be very interesting.

Frederic Bartholdi’s workshop in Paris, as the Statue of Liberty is being assembled. The picture was taken in 1882.

Old Picture of the Day: Statue of Liberty.

As between the Ph.D. in political philosophy (for whom I once worked) and a self-described rodeo clown, I’ll go with the former every time. If Glenn Beck were the future of conservatism, it would become a discredited movement. Fortunately, though, he’s not, and it won’t.

Peter Wehner “Bennett vs. Beck,” Contentions

Seems Rex and Narciso got the discussion started in these parts, and, if I weren’t so busy today, I’d try to weigh in on the Beck-Bennett contro in detail.

It’s been a topic at HotAir and at the Corner, where Bennett’s response first appeared, as well as at Contentions.  Since Beck is having Bennett on his (radio only?) show today, the discussion will likely advance beyond anything I have to say on the specifics, if it hasn’t already.

Bennett’s more concerned with Beck’s presentation and his views on Republicans as (having been) no better than Democrats.  I’ll just add on a key Beck theme that I get his critique of Progressivism, which follows Jonah Goldberg’s work in Liberal Fascism, but at a certain point you have to ask just how far does he want or expect us to go in wiping it out?  Get rid of anti-trust and child labor laws?  Food safety inspection and regulation?  Ballot initiatives/referenda?  National parks?

He says, “of course, not,” but that’s easy for him to say after any given hour near-equating the Progressives with Nazis and Stalinists, and lambasting certain leading Republicans for revering TR.

The President’s strategic priority here is that Westerners, and especially white Westerners, no longer be in the position of Middle Eastern dynasts, namely, statutory rulers of non-Westerners (Muslims for the most part) dwelling with and among the Jews in this case. Furthermore, the scenario that I’m suggesting is entertained by Obama (and key foreign-policy advisors) has two prongs.  In the first, Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the ability to loft them Jerusalem-wards.  Israel, put on notice by the US, does little or nothing about it.  For reasons that I feel no obligation to flesh out here, such an outcome must before long lead to the extinction of the Zionist enterprise known as the State of Israel.

The second prong, obviously, is that Israel will strike Iran to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons over the near term.  All the terrible things that have been forecast should Israel attack Iran very probably will occur.  In that case, the Administration will sever all ties to the country, or will at least attempt to do so, and Israel will be abandoned to its fate.  Needless to say, that outcome will not be the end of Israel but the end of American support for Zionism.

Like all leftists, Barack Obama is a leveler.  He will bow enthusiastically to the Emperor of Japan because he is both non-white and non-Western.  He will bow obsequiously to the King of Saudi Arabia because he is non-Western.  On the other hand, he will merely nod to the Queen of England because she is echt white and Western.  Elizabeth II is the literal embodiment of the historical dominance of non-whites and non-Westerners by white, Western “imperialists.”  The Chinese, naturally enough, must be accorded supreme deference in this hierarchical scheme.  In Copenhagen, for example, Obama wasted no time with the Europeans, whom, I suspect, he despises, but went hat in hand to the President of China for approbation.  George Bush and Bill Clinton’s toleration of the political deformity that is present-day “Communist” China was largely pragmatic.  Obama’s is viscerally ideological.  It is a thoroughly depraved ideology, true, but an ideology nonetheless.

To resume, the Iranians, who are white but fanatically anti-Western, currently have a well-wisher in the Oval Office.  Let them get the bomb, and let the Jews, the white, Western canaries in the geopolitical coal mine, tremble.  What more might an anti-Western bigot, whom the West in a spirit of deracinated anti-bigotry nominated as its spokesman, desire?

Enter “Obama Carter” into a popular search engine, and you’ll find commentaries like this one from Seth Leibsohn at the National Review, reflecting on the President’s recently completed visit to Asia:

This is reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter years — the last time the U.S. was seen as weak — unable to move and coax other countries, unable to reassure dependent allies, unable to have the respect of the world and, of course, unable to move the mullocracy of Iran.

Already in July, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie were invoking Carter in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post:

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike.

Carter 2.0, Carter^2, worse even than Jimmy Carter…  We’re still only in year one of the Age of Obama, but, if the bloggers and pundits are right about our man, if he doesn’t halt and reverse his decline soon, historian Kevin Mattson’s “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” – the story of the third year of the Carter presidency, organized around the famous “malaise speech” – may be a sketch of things to come: not just one or two grand catastrophes, but one botch of a fiasco of a screw-up after another…

Poor, poor pitiful Jimmy Carter began 1979 in bad political shape – his centerpiece energy program having already stalled, the afterglow of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement quickly fading, his approval ratings plummeting amidst seemingly intractable double digit inflation – and it got worse from there:  the Three Mile Island nuclear accident; the worst plane crash in US commercial history; the fall of the Shah and rise of Khomeini; an assassination plot; a cynical populace seemingly uninterested in what any politician had to say; charismatic challengers rising both on the right and from within the president’s own party on the left… and the death of John Wayne, and an assault by a killer rabbit.  As though to make it inescapably clear that the Carter Presidency lacked the Mandate of Heaven, even the national 4th of July celebrations in Washington DC were rained out, and a week later Skylab came crashing to Earth…

The worst problems for the country, the strongest blows to national morale, were not any of the above, however, but rather the fuel shortages severe enough to force rationing, cause panic-buying, and bring declarations of emergency amidst strikes and riots.  Yet in Mattson’s rendering, the final, hardest thing for Carter himself to deal with – harder even than having 29-year-old über-pollster Pat Caddell shouting in his ear about a national moral apocalypse – was being Jimmy Carter.  Carter didn’t just fail to cope with the country’s “malaise” (a word associated with him, but voiced by the Democrats’ foolish wise man of the era, Clark Clifford) , and Carter didn’t just contribute to the malaise:  Carter identified with and thus turned himself into a symptom of malaise – part of a decade-long funk from which the country, when given a chance at the ballot box, would at last vote to rouse itself.

During this difficult period, when many Americans might have appreciated some encouragement, Carter preferred dire pronouncements and pointless I-told-so’s.  As the gas crisis of ’79 intensified, he reminded Americans of his past warnings going back at least to his Inaugural, and had no re-assurance to offer:  “The energy future will not be pleasant,” he said.  Near the peak of the crisis, he had this statement for the worst afflicted:  “I don’t want to mislead you.  It’s going to get worse.”  Spurred on by Caddell while overruling advisers, Carter seemed almost to delight in pessimistic, sermonizing language.  In Q&A at the annual meeting of the Democratic National Committee in May, he spoke off-the-cuff of “unpleasant facts” and the unlikelihood that “somehow or another a miracle is going to occur and a lot of oil is going to be released from secret hiding places.” He took the smattering of applause as a sign he and Caddell were on to something.

By July Carter returned from a luckless foreign trip to a country that seemed “like one large gas line.” His approval rating  was in the 20s, as low or lower than Nixon’s during the depths of Watergate.  He scheduled (yet another) televised speech on energy, and then, in a first for presidents, canceled it and headed off to Camp David without explanation, igniting an explosion of rumors amidst a cloud of confusion, and prompting the question from the New York Post‘s editors that Mattson has lifted for his title.

Even upper White House staff were unsure of the answer when helicoptered out to Camp David.  What had happened was that Carter had at the last minute rejected the uninspired text his writers had put together for him, and had decided instead to confront the national “crisis of confidence” that Caddell had been analyzing all year long.  Mattson describes what ensued as “one of the longest and most gruesome meetings in the history of the Carter administration”:

On July 5, from three forty P.M. until almost midnight, Eizenstat, Powell, Jordan, Rafshoon, and Mondale duked it out in the Laurel Lodge, with Rosalynn shuffling in and out.  The gloves came off.  Eizenstat screamed that Caddell’s ideas were “bullshit.”  Mondale fought off a nervous breakdown, arguing that if Caddell’s ideas were put into a speech that the president might be thought crazy at worst and out of touch at best.  Telling Americans of a psychic crisis – the kind that Caddell seemed obsessed with – made Carter sound like he was blaming them for the energy crisis….  Powell and Jordan acted as mediators as this argument shaped up, trying to prevent things from getting out of control.  But no matter what they did, it felt like the Carter presidency had melted down.

Over the next 10 days, Carter held a series of hastily organized meetings – dubbed a “domestic summit” – with political, religious, and other cultural leaders (almost exclusively from the left and far left), while his speechwriting staff, led by Hendrik Hertzberg, worked to meld the main lessons, along with a re-jiggered energy program, Caddell’s ideas, and Carter’s own longstanding inclinations, into an address.

On July 15, Carter came on at ten P.M. on the East Coast, interrupting broadcasts of The Gambler with James Caan and Moses the Lawgiver starring Burt Lancaster.  The following YouTube is cued to the point where Carter turns from introductory remarks to current events.  I recommend listening for about one minute, to around 2:28:

Americans experienced whiplash, no longer hearing about the energy policy or the civic crisis, but about cabinet disloyalty and government implosion… The “crisis of confidence” speech had successfully seared Americans’ attention, but the cabinet firings scattered it once again and thus returned it to apathy, anger, and confusion… All the president’s men scrambled to figure out what to do as the high ground briefly won by the speech passed into chaos.

In short order, 71% of poll respondents were acknowledging doubt in the president’s “basic competence.”  By the first week of August, the editors at the New Republic published Carter’s political obituary:  “The past two weeks will be remembered as the period when President Jimmy Carter packed it in, put the finishing touches on a failed presidency.” 

In the next months, Carter’s rivals countered his pessimism in exactly the way Mondale and others predicted.  Formalizing an insurgent leftwing candidacy, Ted Kennedy, who had been appalled by the malaise speech from the moment he heard it, sought to invoke America’s “golden promise.”  Taking leadership of a newly minted coalition of urban, often Jewish intellectuals (the first “neocons”) and grassroots, often Christian evangelical conservatives (including the just-launched “Moral Majority”), the equally appalled Ronald Reagan, in his formal announcement, declared that that he saw “no national malaise” and “nothing wrong with the American people.”

Interestingly, though the show might really have been over as of July 17, the public still seemed willing to give their wayward president more chances.  A chart (stolen from a terrific Wall Street Journal collection of presidential polls) of Carter’s public approval confirms that the overnight boost in the polls failed to register, but further demonstrates that Carter’s standing steadily recovered anyway:

Confounding the predictions of many informed observers, who expected energy to dominate American politics for another decade, both the issue and Carter’s failure to address it gradually disappeared from view along with Summer gas shortages.  The foreign policy disasters that closed the year are more frequently recalled, it seems to me – the hostages seized in Iran in November, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December.  In their own day, however, they seem to have had either no political effect or even an initially positive one.  It wasn’t until the Desert One hostage rescue attempt foundered, the economy worsened again, and the presidential campaign began in earnest that Carter’s personal numbers turned south again.

The polling history does not make Mattson wrong to have organized his narrative around the big speech and the months leading up to it, though I’m less inclined than he is to see the event as a great missed opportunity.  We’ll never know what those approval numbers would have looked like if Carter had either never given the address or had followed through on it.  In at least one important respect, Mattson’s narrative confirms both the longer term view and the counter-intuitive polling results.  It reminds us on almost every page that presidential failure, like lesser failures, is rarely the product of a single error or event, or even of a set of errors.  It’s something the man at the top and all the men and women below him renew every day, because it emerges from who and what they really are,  from what the times really demand of them and find them unable to deliver.

Those ever in a hurry to declare the current (or any) presidency over can probably afford to take their time and gather their evidence:  If the President is as wrong or even wronger than they think, they can be confident that the political marathon of horror will continue more or less indefinitely, the bad days far outnumbering the good ones.  Next week, month, and year, and the years after, will likely feature more of the same – even if intermittent successes and strokes of political theater advance the Obamaist agenda, and even if short memories, a willingness to forgive and forget, and a rally-round-the-flag effect convert tragic errors and omissions into political pluses.

On the other hand, if Obama is even a little bit better than they think, he may yet recover:  Even Jimmy Carter almost overcame Jimmy Carter.

“…this has been a weekend full of hate Tweets.  There were objections to my use of the term ‘teabaggers’ to describe Saturday’s protesters.  There is no awareness, it seems, of how they may have brought this upon themselves, choosing a symbol that could easily be conflated with a distasteful sexual term.  It also doesn’t seem to occur to them that there are such things as synonyms. Some words have more than one meaning, totally separate and apart from each other.  They infer what I don’t imply.”

So:  cheese-oh-pete, people, I didn’t mean “teabaggers” when I called them teabaggers, and anyway they should know better than to invoke a well-known symbol from American history of the fight for liberty because there are a lot of folks out there — not me, of course — who have stacks and stacks of dirty pictures, for none of whom am I responsible, because although I wouldn’t actually say this, since it sounds so pathetic and weak, what I was talking about when I said “teabaggers” was “people who steep tea leaves in hot water using teabags.”

Y’all are all the ones with the dirty pictures.  Stop hate-tweeting Alan Colmes for being a dweeb.  Racists!