It Was a Hot and Steamy Day

I was about to say that I don't feel like writing today, but that's not quite it.  I don't feel like thinking today, and writing a serious post requires thinking.

Of course I'm far from alone in this, though I may be rare in recognizing and admitting it.  A former IU student and current Facebook friend said yesterday that the US (and our allies, of course, he added) needs to occupy Pakistan to keep more trouble from erupting in that part of the world.  I replied a US invasion of Pakistan would make things worse, not better; indeed, US aggression is a major source of trouble in that part of the world.  I didn't say we should invade, he protested; I still haven't had the energy to reply that you can hardly have an occupation without an invasion first.  It's my liberal friends who keep reminding me of Molly Ivins's slap at some Texas pol, that if his IQ sank any lower we'd have to water him, and that's what makes me feel like shutting down my brain indefinitely.  I can muster more energy and enthusiasm for slapping down my right-wing friends' howlers -- one of them just reposted this cartoon this morning -- than the complacent babbling of the liberal ones.

So, having said that, let me just refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's fine article "Fear of a Black President," which includes these heartbreaking passages:

I asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.”

And:

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

What makes it particularly awful is that Obama fired Sherrod based on the lies of the unlamented right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who was already known to be fraudulent.  Sherrod was fired by the first black president for no damn reason except his political cowardice.

Meanwhile, over at The Sideshow, Avedon quotes Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report, and comments:

Dixon recommends getting out of the two-party, lesser-evil box and preparing for something new. I don't know how to do that, but I do know that blacks and whites alike are "more unemployed than we've been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we've ever been," and I'm horrified at every "progressive" who somehow thought it was more important to defend Obama's presidency than to defend the Democratic Party and the nation against this rightward push, to the point where even primary challenges to bad Democrats were out of the question. Paul Ryan and other Republican Horrors are people who the Democratic leadership actively protected against real challenges in their districts. The only reason there are any Republicans in Congress from New York is that the Democratic leadership makes sure that happens.

Dixon is right: The Republicans are giving the Obamacrats cover to pass a right-wing agenda. 

The True Pure Centrist commented that the trouble is that people don't know the good things that the Democrats have done: the New Deal, the Civil Rights Bills, Medicare, and so on.  I can't speak for everyone, but I'm fully aware of all Democratic conventions.  It's actually hard to be unaware of those things, because Democratic apologists keep reminding us about them.  So I doubt the general ignorance is as widespread as TPC likes to think.  The trouble is that the great accomplishments he mentions were made a couple of generations ago (Cthulhu, I'm old), and that the last two Democratic administrations have been doing their best to to undo those achievements.

Of course, there are always haters.  This ungrateful Negro, for example, just had to carp and complain and find fault even in the Democrats' glory days:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

It isn't we professional leftists who need to be reminded of what the Democrats did in the past: it is the Democratic mainstream that needs to take stock and stop trying to dismantle everything their predecessors (however half-heartedly) achieved.

The Unbiased View Lies Somewhere in Between

Or, The Return of the True Pure Centrist.

Last summer there was an interesting exchange at the Sideshow between Avedon and one of her regular liberal commenters. I threw in my two-cents worth, and wrote about it here. As so often, I was prophetic:

The voters' dilemma is that neither party is sympathetic to the concerns of the mass of Americans, so there's nothing to do but vote out incumbents. But that will hurt the party in power (currently the Democrats) more than the opposition party. President Obama owes his office and the Democratic majority in Congress to just that anti-incumbent sentiment; it gave him time to make the voters pro-Obama, but he's preferred to worry more about the good feeling of his corporate donors, which sooner or later will hurt him at the polls. When that happens, the True Pure Centrists, true believers all, will blame it not on Obama's failures but on the wickedness of the True Pure Left.

Today the True Pure Centrist, as I'll call him, struck again. Avedon wrote about an exchange she had with a Complete Stranger of the Republican Persuasion, who somewhat to her surprise

agrees with all this crazy left-wing stuff I'm saying. He just has the names wrong. He thinks it was Goldman Sachs Obama didn't save (oh, yes he did!), he thinks McCain and Obama are "moderates", he thinks the kinds of policies he wants are more likely to come about from Republicans, but he still agrees with my crazy left-wing analysis of the policies. I think you'll find there are a lot of Republicans like that.

And you can understand why they have their doubts about their own party right now.

(Which brings something else to mind: the Democrats, understandably if not completely honestly, are stressing what a threat the Republicans are to America. But the Tea Party Extended Tantrum isn't just directed at the Democrats, it's targeting the Republican establishment too, much to the latter's horror. They thought they could use the Tea Party for their own fell purposes, but egad! they find they've created a Finster. *)

In comments, the True Pure Centrist contributed his centrist wisdom. (No permalink; the comment was posted at 4:01:48).

The right-wingers think that the poor are children who have to be lovingly forced to grow up by, for example, denying them life-saving medical care, while the lefties think that the heroic proletariat should live in luxury whether they are willing to work or not. But they all agree on two things: (a) that all Americans should get medical care and (b) that they aren't really willing to pay for their vision of the just society.

Avedon responded beautifully, asking which "lefties" the TPC had in mind.

But I don't know these lefties who "think that the heroic proletariat should live in luxury whether they are willing to work or not." I just don't want them sleeping on grates, starving to death, or dying for lack of decent medical care, and I want them to be able to send their kids to decent schools. Who are you talking about?

You see, in order to walk the Middle Way (full of yellow stripes and dead armadillos) you have to (or get to) make up extremes, the more fanciful the better, and sit yourself down between them. Voila -- Instant Centrism!

Avedon continued:

I'm not clear on your point (b) - do you mean your family all agree that Americans aren't willing to pay for universal healthcare? That's not actually what surveys say. It's not that long ago (despite all the propaganda), that a majority of Americans were telling pollsters that they were willing to pay more in taxes to have a system like the NHS. Do you mean to say that your entire family is this misinformed?

I'd noticed this centrist meme before myself, during the climactic struggle over Obama's health-insurance bill: that the US doesn't have a decent health-care system is

not even the fault of the mass of Americans, despite Christopher Hitchens (via), who "sometimes think Americans want to live dangerously. They think this wouldn’t be America if you had health coverage." Some of Roy Edroso's liberal commenters agree with Hitchens, bashing Joe Sixpack for opposing health care reform even though it is well established that most Americans favor a government-run health insurance plan, if not a government-run health care system.

So there you have it: the latest Obama / Democratic talking point: it's not Obama's fault, or the fault of the Washington establishment or the corporate media, it's the fault of the "lefties" with their fantasies of "the heroic proletariat." Also in comments I suggested that the TPC hadn't meant that most Americans aren't willing to pay for a decent health-care system -- it's the Teabaggers and perhaps some True Pure Centrists who want social programs for them (but not for thee) and they don't want to pay for them. Why shouldn't the Teabaggers confuse themselves with the majority of Americans, when both the corporate media and the political center share that confusion? To our political classes, it's comforting to believe that most Americans are just a bunch of idiots who wouldn't accept decent health-care if it was offered to them; so the True Pure Centrists, especially Obama, who decided that there was no need to offer it anyway.

(Okay, the picture at the top is a dead possum, not a dead armadillo, but it was all I could find, and it conveys the idea. Here in Indiana we don't have armadillos anyway, but we do have plenty of possums, and liberals standing boldly in the middle of the road.)

* I thought "created a Finster" came from an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, but apparently it came from Dudley Do-Right. Snidely Whiplash as a mad scientist exults "Eureka! I've created a Finster!" His assistant corrects him: "'Monster.'" "His name is Finster," Whiplash replies.

Out with the Old Rascals, In with the New Rascals

Over at The Sideshow, Avedon Carol wrote:

...I was going to write about how documenting the atrocities is all very well (information is important), but the frustration of not being able to come up with a coherent response aside from telling people to organize (think about how vague that sounds: What does "organize" mean?) just made it hard to write. I may be somewhat hampered in my ability to form plans by the fact that I don't expect to be alive long enough to see any such plan come to fruition. My own generation just didn't see the developing threat from the right-wing coming - or rather, those of us who did see it coming were not in a position to do anything about it, no matter how much we kept warning people about media consolidation (which, don't kid yourself, has a paramount place in all this). We should all have been buying radio and TV stations or something, I don't know, but the wingers did it instead, and now here we are. I don't think we can rely on the internet as our sole organizing tool, and I think too many people do. I'm not saying it's not good to make use of the internet, I'm just saying there's not really a good way to focus information to specific audiences who wouldn't otherwise look for it when the net as it currently stands is a melee and there's a very strong chance that our owners are going to stop that by not letting us continue to participate in it with the freedom we have had so far. I still think people should do what I've been saying they should do for the last ten years: When you see something you wish your neighbors understood, make a flyer, print it out, and distribute it on doormats and through mailboxes, at church picnics, or wherever you can place them. It's what our Founding Fathers did, after all....

This is a problem that has concerned me for some time. One of The Sideshow's commenters was more sure of himself. I'm going to quote him at some length because there are no permalinks to the comments.

As for organizing in response to the increasing probability of a complete breakdown of representative democracy, what I say is that the True Pure Left is so small that it is manifestly incapable of doing much of anything other than being a nuisance to itself and small dogs. If it is going to accomplish anything, it will have to find allies.

In trying to make allies, it does well to remember that people tend to treat as enemies those who attack them. Therefore, if centrists are attacked by both right and left, they are likely to regard both as enemies. Only if the True Pure Left debases itself enough to admit that other people might have a f--king clue and leaves off being total a--holes in its search for absolute purity, it might have a chance at persuasion. I know for a certainty that you understand this, but some younger and dumber people may not.

However, even if the True Pure Left does all the right things to try to form alliances, sometimes the political/economic situation has to become right for potential allies to hear what they're saying. When that happens, people may not remember exactly whether the positions enunciated by the True Pure Left were sufficiently True or sufficiently Pure, but they will remember who was sympathetic to their concerns, and who behaved like an ass. That will determine whether they decide to work with the right or with the left.

This sounds persuasive, especially the part about "people tend to treat as enemies those who attack them." Ain't it the truth! Referring to people sarcastically as "the True Pure Left" is not going to win this commenter any friends, though it has the advantage of avoiding the necessity of making it clear just who he's talking about. It's, you know, them, the "a--holes." In fact the whole comment is laced with such emotive but vague labels: "centrists," "who was sympathetic to their concerns," But it's also a truth universally acknowledged that the Left in the US and Britain is vanishingly small, and unlikely to have much influence on political reality in the foreseeable future.

But as I pondered the commenter's words, something occurred to me. Again, the Left is vanishingly small in the US; no dispute there. But "centrists" -- we all know who is a centrist, trying very hard to be a centrist, though perhaps slightly favoring the center-right. That enabled me to decode the commenter's subtext. I wrote a reply, which I'm going to work from here.

It was good that he used "centrists" rather than, say, "Democrats." In the US context, "centrists" have embraced too many of the practices and rationales of the right, while still remaining True Pure Centrists, for me to want to build alliances with them. (Not that this matters much, since I am a True Pure Leftist with no political base, so who needs to build an alliance with me? Who even needs my vote? Not the Democrats, I'm sure.) That must be why the Democrats have been so successful in building alliances with the Republicans over the years -- they didn't insult them, but rather tried to understand their positions and ultimately to support them.

There's something else, though. I think that the commenter was confusing factions in the political establishment -- where, it's true, the left is vanishingly small -- with political beliefs and wants in the general population. Those of us who favored single payer, for example, were commonly caricatured by True Pure Centrists as ideological fanatics obsessed with a marginal position that most Americans couldn't care less about. The trouble with that claim was that polls have shown consistently for decades that most Americans want a government health plan or system. The difference seems to be that what he, with his alliance-building generosity of spirit, call the True Pure Left, talks about it, writes about, criticizes the political classes for ignoring it, and points out their relation to big Pharma and the insurance companies. Granted, doing so isn't going to win the TPL any friends in the political classes, but I'm not sure that's an entirely bad thing.

The same goes for Social Security. The True Pure Centrists want to downgrade it, privatize it, cut benefits, get rid of it. The mass of Americans want to keep it, and the TPC are unhappy that most Americans are too stupid to realize the political necessity of cutting back "entitlements." Again, it's mainly the TPL who write, argue, blog, about it and make unkind inferences about the political/financial interests of the TPC. And so on, from issue to issue.

When Avedon talked about organizing, I don't think she means finding common ground with centrists like Barack Obama and being nice to them so he'll be on our side. The problem, I believe, is how best to organize outside the True Pure Centrist political classes, who are not "the average person" and indeed are quite contemptuous of that mythical construct. It seems to be concerns about the well-being of most of our fellow citizens that prompt accusations of political Purity, revealingly enough. President Obama will find this out to his dismay, I believe, because as the economy continues to slog along without real improvement for most people, as our two wars continue and possibly are joined by more, when it comes time to go to the polls, they will "remember who was sympathetic to their concerns, and who behaved like an ass."

The voters' dilemma is that neither party is sympathetic to the concerns of the mass of Americans, so there's nothing to do but vote out incumbents. But that will hurt the party in power (currently the Democrats) more than the opposition party. President Obama owes his office and the Democratic majority in Congress to just that anti-incumbent sentiment; it gave him time to make the voters pro-Obama, but he's preferred to worry more about the good feeling of his corporate donors, which sooner or later will hurt him at the polls. When that happens, the True Pure Centrists, true believers all, will blame it not on Obama's failures but on the wickedness of the True Pure Left.

By the way, I've been seeing more and more talk lately about the perception of President Obama as a wimp, a wuss, etc. Even Avedon linked to another blogger's post entitled "Some Suggestions for Our Inert President." Inert? I don't think so. He's been quite assiduous in working for the interests of the corporate branch of our government, in bombing civilians, in anything which does not serve the needs of most people. Alexander Cockburn summed it nicely at Counterpunch this weekend, but I think he concedes to much to the public-relations concerns of media professionals and the politicians who depend on them.

The White House press corps – until recently without a presidential press conference for ten months – quizzes Obama’s press secretary about Obama’s evident inability to project anger about BP’s oil spill, now bidding to be the greatest environmental disaster in the nation’s history. Obama’s flack claimed his boss was “enraged” at BP. “Can you describe it?” asked Chip Reid of CBS. “Does he yell and scream? What does he do?” The best Gibbs could offer was evocation of Obama’s “clenched jaw”.

At least half of any US president’s job is play-acting, pretending to be in charge, on behalf of We the People.

I don't want Obama to put on a show of anger, which he could do without actually doing anything about the object of his anger. I don't want him to groom his image, I don't want him to "send a message", I want him to take effective action in service of the people who voted for him. Having done so, he can do his Joe Smooth routine for the media, and it might even be more convincing if he had something positive to be smooth about. One reason he's so visibly uncomfortable now, I think, is that on some level he's suffering the effects of saying one thing but doing another.