This will be cross-posted on my blog, wantsomewood.blogspot.com.
In the almost-two-years that I have been reading and posting to DailyKos, I have come to really like the site, especially "Cheers and Jeers," which always cheers me up (pun intended) on a hard day. I have nevertheless had my share of differences with the site's founder, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (also known as Kos). Most glaringly, I dislike his angry dismissal of Democratic leaders he doesn't like or with whom he disagrees, combined with his near-hagiography of a small group of politicians, such as Howard Dean and Brian Schweitzer. (More below)
Then, I read Kos's article about what he calls "libertarian Democrats," and I realized that I didn't know the half of it. If Kos wants to call himself a "libertarian democrat," that's fine, although I am not planning on joining him any time soon. But why were all the harsh words about liberal Democrats necessary to make his point? I am a liberal Democrat, and damn proud of it. Nothing that Kos or anybody else says will ever change that.
Of course, Kos has a right to his point of view (just like I have a right to mine). What he does not have the right to do is distort what it means to be a liberal Democrat, which is what he did in his manifesto for libertarian Democrats.
Here's what he had to say:
"Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians.
But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn't believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations."
Kos, if I could talk to you, here's what I'd say: Liberal Democrats NEVER, EVER believed that government is the solution to everything, and they still don't believe that now. What we believe is that the free market is great and works well in many ways, but it isn't perfect. Society functions best when government provides a safety net for the inevitable victims of the free market, regulations (the r-word) to keep the free market from claiming more victims, and a level playing field for the competition of the free market.
This was the philosophy of the Democratic party from the days of the Progressive movement, and it saw its greatest success in the New Deal and the Roosevelt Administration, still one of America's finest hours. It continued up until the Great Society and, in many ways, all the way into the Clinton Administration. The liberal Democratic philosophy, and its many legislative and political successes--social security, civil rights legislation, environmental and safety regulations, union support, the GI bill and other support for education, and a host of other things--built the American middle class, and helped make this a great country.
That said, liberals never believed that government was the solution to everything. Think about it: Did Roosevelt end free enterprise? Did Kennedy, or Johnson, or Clinton? They did so only in right-wing fantasies. In fact, the far left often held Roosevelt and his successors in contempt, saying that they co-opted socialism while saving capitalism. James Carville, in his book We're Right, They're Wrong (a fantastic book that every progressive should read) mentioned that in the thirty years after World War II, when liberals were politically dominant, both the top and the bottom 20% income brackets saw their income double-quite an achievement in business for a group that thinks government is the solution to everything. Ted Sorenson, in his book Why I Am a Democrat (sadly out of print, but also quite worth reading), argued that business leaders support Republicans with their money, but like the broadly-spread prosperity that Democrats enable, because it enriches them in the long-term.
This is why it makes perfect sense that somebody could be a liberal Democrat and still mistrust misuses of government by bad people, namely excessive surveillance, disrespect for civil liberties, and so on. There is a reason why the American Civil Liberties Union was peopled mostly with liberals, and why George Bush Senior (in one of the many outrages of the 1988 campaign) used Michael Dukakis' membership in the ACLU as proof that he was somehow bad and evil.
Conservatives are actually the ones who are dogmatic about government. Congressman Dick Armey, a (fortunately) former Congressman who would be entirely comfortable in today's congress, summed it up in a typical piece of right-wing dogma: "The market is rational and the government is dumb." E. J. Dionne summed it up best (as he so often does) when he said in his book Stand Up, Fight Back that conservatives had more faith in the ability of government to do wrong than liberals ever had in it to do right.
This is why it is infuriating to see Kos repeat a minor variation on one of the oldest conservative lies about liberals--that they're a bunch of communists who want the government to run everything. How is Kos saying this hugely different from Joe Lieberman, whom Kos rightly takes to task, undermining liberal Democrats on Meet the Press and Fox News?
The real irony of Kos's statement, however, is that it is EXACTLY THE SAME CRITIQUE THAT THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL MAKES OF LIBERAL DEMOCRATS--namely, that they are in favor of too much government. Kos is rightly angry at the DLC, which is great, but then why does he parrot their worst distortions of liberal history?
If you don't believe me about the DLC, look at this,
http://www.dlc.org/...
this (note in particular how Marshall claims that support for unchanged welfare is "liberal orthodoxy"),
http://www.dlc.org/...
or this (note how the writer says that welfare reform was only possible when Republicans controlled Congress and the liberals were shut out of the process, and mischaracterizes the 1994 crime bill as a failure because liberal interest groups were too involved).
http://www.dlc.org/...
Then, of course, there's the other piece of shrapnel in Kos's attack, in which he says that liberal Democrats are "extinct." I had to laugh at this at first, since I haven't lived a day in my life in any era in which somebody (almost always a conservative, or a mainstream media idiot carrying conservative water) wasn't saying that liberalism was dead. I also have to laugh at the utter surrealism of seeing people say that liberalism is dead on a liberal web site, and of seeing it said by someone who regularly attacks others (Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, etc.) for what he considers deviations from liberal orthodoxy.
Of course, if liberal philosophy is dead, then it's good I have so much company in extinction, including among many others Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Jesse Jackson Jr., John Lewis, Charles Rangel, Robert Wexler, Bernard Sanders, Parris Glendening, Paul Sarbanes, Barbara Mikulski, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown, Tim Ryan, Robert Menendez, John Corzine, Martin Olav Sabo, Phil Angelides, Dennis Kucinich, Charlie Gonzalez, Lloyd Doggett, Lane Evans, Tammy Baldwin, Barney Frank, Jim McGovern, George Miller, Nancy Pelosi, Carl Levin, Diana Degette, Barack Obama, Patty Murray, Bob Graham, Ciro Rodriguez, Byron Dorgan, Major Owens, Sheila Jackson Lee, Tom Udall, and many other folks I could name (so far, I've named only Congressional and statewide elected officials).
Perhaps the best evidence that liberalism is far from dead is what happened when Bush set out to eviscerate Social Security, a core New Deal success story and liberal achievement. Bush had just won the election, and was expected to triumph easily, with Democrats hopelessly divided, and liberalism permanently dispirited. As we all know, quite another thing happened (and Kos does deserve credit for his part in it, which wasn't insignificant). Not bad for a dead philosophy.
It helped, of course, that lots of people who don't follow politics closely, and even people who aren't liberal otherwise or don't even know what that word means, believed in the ideal of a social safety net, including but not limited to Social Security. That is the supreme irony of liberalism-the word "liberal," to the extent that it's known to the public at all, is less popular than it should be, but most of the things that real liberals support-a social safety net, the United Nations, government regulations to protect health and safety and stop monopolies, support for unions, gun control (yes, really), tough and realistic but multilateral foreign policy-are popular with the public. What that says to me is not that we have to throw out our whole ideology, or move well to the right (as the DLC would have us do). What we have to do is to be better strategists, to rehabilitate the word "liberal" and reclaim it (much as gay activists have done with the word "queer"), and to do what Michael Tomasky and Paul Waldman, among others, have suggested we do-weave all of those beliefs into a movement and a common theme. What we certainly don't have to do is parrot the worst lies that the right wing has told about us, which is what the DLC-and, ironically, Kos-have chosen to do.
The ironic thing about all this is that I am not totally opposed to what Kos was proposing. While I have no use for institutional, big-L libertarianism (as I've made clear in previous diaries), I have no objection to the Democratic party reaching out to small-l libertarians. Of course, I'm not really saying much here, because I have no problem with the Democratic party reaching out to practically anybody, as long as core values are respected (a big provision, I realize). The problem is that Kos could have cut back drastically on the hostility to this idea if he hadn't been so ready to personalize disagreements and conflicts, and dismiss anybody with whom he has a tactical or stylistic disagreement. Maybe someday, he will learn this.
UPDATE: One quick thing I wanted to clarify: I am not saying that I despise the ground Kos walks upon, or anything like that. Kos does deserve a lot of credit for being one of the people that created the blogosphere as we know it today, and while he didn't invent grassroots politics, he has played an important role in revitalizing it. I like to give everybody (even conservatives!) credit where credit is due, so I thought I should point that out. That said, I figure that it ought to be alright here to vigorously criticize Kos when I disagree with him, just as Kos himself vigorously criticizes those with whom he disagrees. (So far as I can tell, no one in the comments has suggested that it's not alright.)