Levees Not War

Photo by Stephanie Ziobro

“I love gridlock. I think we’re better off when we’re gridlocked because we’re not passing things.” —Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK)

Commenting on this remark by the good doctor in a town hall meeting over the weekend, Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, said on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

“There’s a crucial asymmetry in the disposition of Republican legislators and Democratic legislators. Democratic legislators—I’m generalizing, but on the whole, want to legislate, they want to pass legislation. They think that’s their job. Republican legislators don’t really want to legislate so much as they want to sort of funnel resources of the state into the hands of their backers and their clients, and they want to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. I mean, the old William F. Buckley quote is “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” That’s why all the things that tie up government, the filibuster, even if in the short term it favors one party or another, in the long term it favors the forces of reaction. Tom Coburn understands that well. I wish that all the Republican senators were as articulate in spelling that out.”

In this comment, Hayes elaborates well on an observation we’ve made before: what Republicans (the breed in power in Washington nowadays) take seriously is not governing but holding power, “power to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, to privatize the functions of government that can’t be abolished outright, to weaken labor unions, and to give the oil industry and the military / security complex anything they want.”

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“Work as if you are in the early days of a better nation.” —Alasdair Gray

We were delighted to see President Obama’s fiery, fightin’ spirit Friday as he swung into Elyria, Ohio, in full campaign mode with his “never stop fighting” speech. You go, O.

But, listen, populist rhetoric alone won’t do it. Democrats—and the White House in particular—must take strong actions (take stands, build support, gather coalitions, and cast votes). Be specific and firm about health care and banking reforms. Don’t be so vague, aloof, and passive. Stop letting opponents frame the debate. Take strong action. Grab them bankers by the throat. Make ’em gasp. (See the example of JFK vs. U.S. Steel in 1962 in Frank Rich’s column “After the Massachusetts Massacre.”)

In our last post we urged Democrats to be boldly populist and fight for the ordinary voters. We called on Democrats—and independents and any elected officials who want to make this a better, internally stronger nation—to speak up for the positive role of government. It is imperative to counter the conservative/Republican con job about government’s being “the problem” (as Reagan famously accused, though Jimmy Carter had done the same before him—thanks a lot) and give definite examples of how the public benefits from good government.

To start with some good talking points, the message is well summarized in the following passages from our friend Joe Conason in his bestselling book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (hailed by Paul Krugman as “must reading for anyone who wants to understand America today”):

“. . . remember that America in the twentieth century was built on liberal policy, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the GI Bill, and the Great Society. The modern economy—a private enterprise system that relies on government safeguards against depression and extreme poverty—is the legacy of liberal leadership, from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. . . . Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress . . .

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“. . . although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, [pseudo-conservatives] show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. . . . Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways. . . . The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

—Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (1954)

We’ve been looking for a more accurate word to describe those on the political right. Philosophically, self-proclaimed “conservatives” are far from the root meaning of conserve, as in conservation, preservation (see Inhofe below). “Traditionalist” would not do, either, exactly. “Pseudo-conservative,” the term used above by Hofstadter? Radicals? Revolutionaries? The question of identity here is not so much about ordinary citizens who are understandably ill at ease with high government spending, economically insecure, suspicious of the mainstream news media, and so on. We’re thinking more of the elites, the elected officials who until recently held the White House and majorities in Congress, certain corporate executives and right-wing think tankers and pundits who identify themselves as conservatives.

Now, of course, those who call themselves conservatives will insist that they are the true Americans, and that those they oppose are not worthy of the name (think, for example, of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee [1938–75]). And the more fiercely “conservative,” the more vehemently they insist. But we think they do protest too much.

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