Where are the Liberals?
The Atlantic is featuring three theories on why liberals haven’t been more effective under the Obama Administration, particularly given Democrats’ control of all three branches.
First up is Kevin Baker of Harper’s, who argues that liberals simply have no backbone, practicing what can only be called “learned helplessness.” Baker believes that while liberalism shows some life among our citizenry, the government / leadership class has all but forgotten its relevance. The “center-right” conventional wisdom has solidified and the mere utterance of “the L word” spells political disaster.
Second is the Center for American Progress’s Matt Yglesias, who claims that liberals fail to negotiate effectively. You can’t get the other side to budge unless they think you’ll walk away (I learned this mattress shopping), and since liberals obviously really want health reform, etc, opponents have no incentive to give any ground. If they want a deal, they should find issues that centrists care deeply about and which liberals are merely willing to along.
And third, blogger Chris Bowers suggests that liberals are too much of an easy win for Obama. He knows they’ll support him as the least-bad option no matter what, so they have no bargaining chips.
My sense is that Bowers and Baker are mostly right. And their points are connected: because liberals know they’re down and out in contemporary American politics, they’ll take whatever the Democrats give them. Why hold out for distant ideals when it could jeopardize the little gains they’ve made through a moderate Democratic majority?
Yglesias seems way off the mark, however. I think he’s made two grossly inaccurate assumptions: (1) that it’s somehow “pragmatic” to abandon the group’s most important beliefs in search of issues they could take or leave, and (2) that there’s a rich, untapped set of ideals that are dear to so-called “centrists.”
The thrust of these two points gets at a hot-button issue within political philosophy – the debate between principles and pragmatism. It’s a debate that we continue to wear out on this blog. I think we’re too eager to jump from one to the other, ignoring that principles are simply inescapable and pragmatism need not be reduced to defeatism. Politics may the be the art of compromise, but when compromise becomes tit-for-tat gamesmanship, principle tends to fly out the window. “I’ll give you that aggressive war if you give me affirmative action and expanded medicare”… is that the world we want to live in?
In the end, this kind of pragmatic ambition on the part of the left (plenty has been written about Rahm Emanuel in this regard) may have the reverse of its intended effect. By refusing to stand for something, liberals may find themselves with very little with which to bargain with.
So – ask yourselves: Did Obama fail to successfully “make the case” for health care reform? Or did he aggressively overreach past the American mainstream? To make a deal, or fight for an ideal? Many will answer that it’s possible to do both, and I hope they’re right. But I’m certain of this – liberals won’t get far by waiting for the centrists to get excited.
-Colin
Image by pjchmiel used under CC license.
Related posts:
- Max Weber and realism
- Obama’s governing philosophy
- Glenn Beck and Plato
- Obama’s pragmatism
- Why did Brown win?
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