I’ve been at DKos for a while and mostly I’ve written about Jack Abramoff and the culture of corruption in Washington. From time to time I have weighed in on other topics, but I’ve mostly stayed out of the pie fights and flame wars. Sure, I get into a heated thread from time to time and like many, I got a bit passionate during the Presidential Primary season in 2007-2008. But I’ve mostly kept to my research and away from the back and forth. That changed last week and now I’m an active participant one of these debates as oppose to the more comfortable role of an observer.
I’ve been paying more attention to this debate. I’ve been reading the Diaries and the comments back and forth. I’ve gone to other sites to see how people are talking about not only the HCR debate, but also larger issues like corporate influence, the future of the progressive movement, the Democratic Party and whether President Obama is already a failure or even a man that progressives should still trust and support.
Through it all, something has been bothering me and I think I know what it is.
To the jump...
In a nutshell, I think that our politics in America has been infected by the two core memes/myths of Ronald Reagan:
First: that the Government is always the problem, and
Second: that all politics and policy battles are always binary conflicts.
The power of the change that Reagan brought to America was that these two pretty radical ideas have taken root. These infections have become so ingrained in our political system that almost nobody challenges them as problems or even takes the time to note their existence and their corrosive impact on our politics. This is especially true when it comes to the meme that all political debates or conflicts can only be understood through a binary filter. It is the auto-embrace of these Reagan myths that have really bugged me about this latest netroots dust-up that I’ve joined as a participant.
The debate I stepped into is a broad one. It starts with issues of the HCR debate and what progressives should do next, now that it looks like the final Bill will not include a public option and that the final Legislation will have some serious flaws (I weighed in on where I stood back in November with this Diary: Sorry. This Legislation is gonna suck. And that's OK.).
Folks can place me in the cohort of progressive activists who think the bill should pass because that is historically how liberals and progressives make progress. We pass flawed legislation and improve it over time. I take a long view, but I was not passionate about the "pass the Bill/kill the Bill" issue enough to actively jump into the HCR fallout debate.
That changed last week when Jane Hamsher decided that she needed to form an alliance with Grover Norquist to weaken and attack the Obama Administration. I’ve looked into the stated case for the Norquist/Hamsher Alliance and I have found the joint call to action to be almost total bullshit (for some details follow this link). Forming an alliance with a dirtball like Norquist was just a bridge too far. I can usually keep my anger in check, but this alliance with the worst criminal elements of the Right-wing machine of destruction compelled me to react with a Christmas Eve Diary (Grover Norquist is our ally? Are you f@%&ing kidding me!). And so now I’m an active participant in this ongoing debate about FDL, HCR, Rahm, corporate influence, President Obama and the future of progressives. I am a bit surprise, but so be it.
My initial anger has abated in the last week to be replaced with a great sense of sadness that we are even spending time on this back and forth. It really is a waste of time and energy when we should be unified, but sometimes these debates need to be had. Perhaps this is one of those times. It is hard to be unified when an embrace of Reagan’s myth that all politics must be reduced to a binary struggle is the only way we choose to process the debate. This guarantees division and failure (IMHO).
Over the weekend there were some very good Diaries about this back and forth. They mostly invoked thought and discussion as oppose to flames and tribalism. The Anti-Corporatist Movement by BooMan23, "Corporatism" by Jeffrey Feldman, and There IS a Way Out of This Hell by thereisnospoon were three that stood out for me and there were many other posts and comments that I read here and elsewhere that I though added to a thoughtful debate as opposed to a mere flame war.
Details swirled in and out of these Diaries and the comments I’ve been reading—often being used to mask other concerns and agendas. The Public Option, the Senate Bill, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama, HCR, Jane Hamsher, neo-liberals, progressives, Grover Norquist and more flooded the zone and through it all something was really bothering me about the tone and architecture of the debate. At the core, I found the flaw to be that almost everybody accepted the Reagan belief of binary political framing as an immutable fact—an assumption that that was a given and unchallengeable. Most of the arguments tended to devolve into a discussion of how to define the binary conflict within the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. And then, once the two opposing side were defined, how we should deal with "winning" this struggle. The more I read, the more this basic assumption became a glaring problem for me—the proverbial elephant in the room as it were.
Then on Sunday I read a recommended Diary, The 1990s Are Over. Has Anyone Noticed? by eugene. It was a well written and well argued essay and if you have not read it, I would encourage you to do so. I liked it, but I could not recommend it, but I deeply appreciate the way that essay got me thinking and the connections it helped me to make. It really crystallized for me the problem with the active embrace of Reagan’s idea that all politics must be reduce to a simple and easily named binary conflict.
His essay basically argued that the neo-liberal, pro-corporate days of the 1990s are over and that we are in a new time where these ideas must be rejected and fought if we are to have any hope for the future. He argues that progressives will always be weak if we do not realize that we are in a permanent struggle with corporations and their enablers in the Democratic Party. He presents six ways that progressive embrace defeat by buying into false neo-liberal myths developed in the 1990s. He advocates that we rejected these ideas, take a more aggressive stance and fight our intra-Party/Movement battle now as the most important thing that we can do with our time and energy. At least that is how I understood it, but you should read it, judge it for yourself and come to your own conclusion—my take is just my take.
Even in my first reading of the essay, I found myself having a big problem with list of the "pernicious ways that progressives are inveigled or forced to abandon what we know to be true and right". Especially troubling was his point #5: Using the right-wing as a bogeyman. The argument here was that progressive back off taking a hard stand when the concern that the Right-wing will take back power is raised as a possible outcome of division within our movement. I found the idea that we do not have to worry about the Right and that any concerns about the right-wing taking advantage of divisions in the Democratic Party are merely a Neo-liberal myth to be a bit troubling. That this point also seemed to be a sly justification of the Norquist/Hamsher Alliance and other efforts to carry on the fight within the progressive movement by any means necessary also bugged me. While well argued and written, I found the notion that not only do we not need to worry about the Right-Wing, but that it is also OK (and even desirable) to join forces with them if it helps us in the internal fight for the "soul" (or control) of the Progressive Movement and the Democratic Party against the neo-liberals among us, to be an extremely bad idea.
How you choose to do something is as important as important as your goal. I do not think that your desired ends ever justify means that compromise your beliefs and values. And so, I think the idea of the Norquist/Hamsher Alliance is crazy. Now, I could be over sensitive to justifications for an alliance with Norquist because I know more about the little bastard than most folks. I spent some time over the last week thinking about my reaction to this Alliance and my anger. After I read eugene’s essay, I spent some time on Sunday reflecting about my reaction to it and separating my reaction from the specific problem I had with the Norquist/Hamsher Alliance. As I re-read the essay later in the day it was the deeper structural problem of his argument that bothered me. The core problem for me was that it depended on the two big memes/myths of Reagan to make its case. A given in the argument was that progressive could not trust the Government to be part of the solution and in this there was common cause with the right—especially the manufactured populist anger of recent months. And the argument was firmly rooted in the belief that the struggle in the Democratic Party/Progressive Movement could only be defined as a binary struggle between two opposite forces. The solution was for everybody was to choose sides and get into the fight.
I think that is completely wrong. I think the solution is to completely reject the two core memes/myths of Reagan and get on with the hard business of repairing the damage of the last forty years. It is time to purge our politics of these infections.
Quite simply it is this: our politics have been infected by two core memes (or myths) of Ronald Reagan and until we let go of them, the Right-wing and their corporate paymasters will always win.
The legacy of Ronald Reagan has poisoned America in countless ways, but perhaps nothing he did had quite the corrosive effect as his two big memes that pollute and hurt our political life as a Nation every day. The first one is widely recognized and embraced by folks on the Right, Left and Center and immutable fact:
"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem."
This, for me, is at the heart of every progressive battle. I firmly believe that this quote—this meme—is the second most destructive myth to infect American politics in my lifetime. It is absolute bullshit. And yet, day after day, on progressive sites and conservative sites, in traditional media and in blogs, one can see over and over and over again the endorsement of this myth by way too many folks on the right, the left and the imaginary center.
HCR, immigration, climate change legislation, GLBT rights, education, jobs, lobbying reform, campaign finance, fighting corruption and on and on and on. To solve any of these issues in a way that promotes justice and perfects our Union requires Government to be part of the solution. That so many firmly believe the lies of Saint Ronnie, including way too many self-identified progressives, is hurting our ability to make progress and to bring about real change. In way too many posts and comments about HCR, President Obama and policy debates a surprising number of progressives are willing to embrace the idea that Government is the problem as a simple fact of life. Worse, some will intentionally fluff the Government as an incompetent, evil problem if they think it might lead them to a short term victory. This embrace of cynicism for a short-term temporary gain is disgusting (IMHO). When I see progressives auto-assume that the government is always the problem, I wince. The Norquist/Hamsher Alliance is firmly rooted on the idea that the Government is the problem and it is a willful embrace of cynicism and Reagan’s framing of American politics. This blatant hypocrisy and cynicism is one of the reasons that I had to take a stand against it (the sleaze of Norquist is another).
"The Government is always the problem" is the second worst meme of Reagan, but at least it is recognized as a problem. The worst meme of Reagan has become so ingrained in our politics that it is almost invisible and that is what has bothered me about so much of the debate concerning HCR, FDL, neo-liberals, corporatists and the "fight’ for the soul of the Democratic Party and/or the progressive movement.
Reagan infected America with the idea that all politics are binary.
He forged this idea in the furnace of the Red Scare, Goldwater and the extreme wing-nut ideas. In many ways the idea of filtering all politics as a binary struggle is as old as time. It is an organizing device to mobilize groups into collective action. It is especially useful during the final weeks of an election campaign or if you are a single issue group trying to build support for that issue. The binary framing has its usefulness in the grab bag of political tools, strategies and tactics.
Reagan’s innovation was the idea that a binary test should be applied to every idea, every issue, and every debate. That every aspect of our politics could and should be reduced to a fractal of the larger binary struggle between the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. Today this limited rhetorical tactic has been expanded so that it is the organizing framing for every political discussion. This infection weakens our ability to find solutions to the many problems that beset our Nation and our world. Complexity is lost and everything is always distilled down to a battle between two opposing sides and that once those sides are established; everything else is viewed only through that narrative. Any new idea, "sub-detail" or new issue is measured by their impact on the larger binary fight. Reagan gave us the idea that only binary conflict exists and that no other model is possible for understanding politics and policy. It is an poisonous idea that has been embraced hook, line and sinker by the Right, Left and Center. It is also an idea that belongs on the dustbin of history.
Reagan’s triumph is that now everything must be framed and understood only in binary terms. It is left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal and every issue, debate, challenge or discussion must be fit into that frame. And the issues, debates and ideas on either the left or the right must also follow a binary frame down to the smallest fractal. You’re either a neo-liberal or a true progressive. You’re either a corporate sell-out Democrat or a Democrat willing to stick it to the man. You’re either for a Public Option or you’re for the insurance companies. In debate after debate on issue after issue Left, Right and Center embrace the simple binary framing of Ronald Reagan as the only way we can organize and discuss politics in America. This binary meme is constantly reinforced by our media, new and old. Millions of words have been written on blogs, spoken on the teevee, or published in print on the current challenges facing America and President Obama. And almost every one of those words have accepted Reagan’s meme of binary frame as an unchangeable and unquestionable fact of life. It isn’t, but is a very powerful and destructive myth.
Reagan’s binary frame is at the heart of conservative power. It is how complex issues are reduced to sound bites and sculptured into fear delivery vehicles. When paired with the idea that Government is always the problem, the addiction to binary frames guarantees a downward spiral of government and its ability to be part of the solution. Together these two memes feed cynicism and fear and that has been enough to stop any progressive movement in the last fifty years. And often, the right has had the assistance of progressive single issue groups in helping to block a progressive agenda, because single issue groups rely on binary framing and calling out problems in the government to draw attention to their issues and their agendas.
The embrace of these two memes, especially the notion of binary frames, has not helped the progressive movement at all. This is especially true when it comes to the single issue groups that always seek to capture the agenda of the progressive movement. By the nature of what they do, these groups enthusiastically embrace Reagan’s binary framing. They are trying to build attention and dedication to their issue. A binary frame is a perfect fit. Villains or bogeymen are a great organizing tool regardless whether your bogeyman is Karl Rove or Rahm Emanuel. From time to time a single issue group gains enough power to define the binary struggle for a given political party. This can be a real problem.
In my lifetime, single issue groups capturing the Democratic Party and the progressive movement with their agenda have been a disaster. Battles between single issue groups helped Conservatives gut environmental laws, labor laws, civil rights laws and more. In election after election between 1976 and 2004 the battles of the single issue groups to control the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda led to defeat after defeat on Election Day. One of the reasons I joined Dkos back in 2004 was that Markos was calling out these groups and their tactics as a major cause of Progressive losses over the years. We won in 2006 and 2008 in large measure because the single issue groups of our movement were weak. Now they are strong again and inviting us to use Reagan’s binary framing as the only way to think about progressive politics and what our agenda should be for 2010 and beyond. It is an invitation that I must decline.
Life is not simple. It is not binary. Our politics are not simple as well. Our politics and the challenges that we face are complex. They do not fit into the false construction of a simple binary frame. And when you try to force every discussion into Reagan’s binary frame, progressives will lose every time, because that simplistic view is at odds with reality and to embrace the binary frame one must leave a reality based world and move into the conservative realm of truthiness, spin, hype and exaggeration.
Life is complex. It is difficult, but that complexity can be embraced with facts, logic, reason and hope. This is why I am a Liberal. This is why I am a progressive. I believe that we can solve big problems—especially if we free ourselves to believe that solutions are possible. The two memes/myths of Reagan that infect our politics are designed to prevent us from imagining solutions, they are designed to prevent us from finding common cause and hope for the future. They are design to have us embrace and fight to protect artificial limits. They are designed to encourage cynicism and since 1980 they have done just that.
The biggest single challenge for the progressive movement (IMHO) is destroying these two memes/myths of Reagan. For me, this trumps everything else because while these myths define our politics nothing else is possible. On a daily basis, I only see one person leading the fight to cleanse our politics of these Reagan myths and that is President Obama. Some people argue that he is playing some kind of 11th dimensional chess or long game that is hard to figure out. I think it is actually quite simple. He is out to refute and expose these Reagan myths as ideas that belong on the dustbin of history. The Wing-nuts know this and that is why they fight him with everything they’ve got. They are doubling down on the idea that everything must be viewed in the binary prism and that everything President Obama says or does is a fractal of Reagan’s great Left/Right binary struggle.
And on the Left many are equally mad at Obama for not embracing their view of the epic Left/Right binary struggle. They see his failure to embrace the Reagan framing of politics in America as a major failing. I see it as a gigantic sign of hope.
Our politics is complex and rather than embrace the simplistic false binary framing of every issue, President Obama is embracing that complexity and promoting that complexity. Our politics is not a simple binary choice. Rather it is a series of Overton windows intersecting with each other to form complex structures that change form with different issues. I am encouraged to see President Obama embrace this complexity on issue after issue and avoid the easy path of embracing Reagan’s myths. And while he works to purge our politics of these infections he has my full and enthusiastic support. As I said, I see this as the core political battle of the moment. Without the destruction of these two Reagan memes I see little hope for progress in the future on any issue.
In Reagan’s binary frame we can not find solutions to our problems because we can never have any common ground and every issue must be squeezed into this simplistic conflict intensive frame. So, the Climate Crisis is partisan, so is poverty, so is National Security, economic policy and even visits to an elementary school. Everything is grist for the partisan mill. And Obama’s frontal assault on Reagan’s binary framing terrifies the Right even more than Obama’s effort to prove that Government can and should be part of the solution to the problems we face.
Our politics in America has been pretty sick most of my lifetime. The cause of that illness (IMHO) is the virus of Reaganism and his two core myths: that Government is always the problem and that all political issues must be viewed in a binary frame. This infection impacts folks on the Left, the Right and the so called center. It is how the Right and their corporate paymasters have maintained and increased their control over the years. I think we have to purge the system of these memes and I think that this is what President Obama is doing. And so, I have his back.
As for the latest netroots dust-up that I’ve joined as a participant—mostly, I think it is a distraction and a waste of all of our time. Still, if some are out there promoting the Norquist/Hamsher Alliance as a good idea, I will have to respond as it is a completely flawed and self-destructive idea that is very, very wrong on way too many levels.
Well, that’s my two cents for whatever it is worth.
Cheers