The Part Krugman Leaves Out
Sun Mar 02, 2008 at 09:17:02 PM PDT
I'm guessing mine won't be the first diary hashing out Krugman's latest attack on Obama and it certainly won't be the last. Other diaries will hopefully offer the kind of point by point deconstruction that I provided back in December.
My goal here is different. It's to point out the importance of what Krugman leaves out - because as any good academic knows, what you leave out is just as important as what you put in.
It's my contention that Krugman's column is fatally flawed by its absence of two related topics: Hillary Clinton and political empowerment. To Krugman this campaign is all about who talks a progressive game. Ironically, the person who Krugman believes best spoke that language - Edwards - himself offered some very centrist things on health care, for example (he supported a neoliberal solution and pooh-poohed single-payer).
But as we are left with two candidates - Edwards has been gone for over a month - it is reasonable to ask if Krugman's criticisms of Obama are sufficient to suggest Obama would be a bad nominee.
All in all, the Democrats are in a place few expected a year ago. The 2008 campaign, it seems, will be waged on the basis of personality, not political philosophy. If the magic works, all will be forgiven. But if it doesn’t, the recriminations could tear the party apart.
Krugman closes his column on this note, suggesting that Obama is a step in the wrong direction because he's not a progressive. Never mind that Krugman is flat wrong to charge Obama with using right-wing talking points on health care - mandated insurance is a fundamentally right-wing concept, after all - even if we agreed with Krugman re: Obama, what then? Are we to somehow believe that Hillary Clinton is running a campaign based on political philosophy and not personality?
Hillary's recent campaign rhetoric has focused on these oh-so-progressive matters:
- Who can be trusted to answer a phone in the middle of the night
- Who can get the biggest bump out of SNL
- Whether Obama really is Muslim
- Which states' votes don't count
Krugman is singling out Obama here but giving Hillary a pass. Hillary's campaign has never really emphasized progressive philosophy in any meaningful way. She has not leveled any systematic critique of the Bush/Republican philosophy of government. Instead she has frequently voted to enact that philosophy, most notably in the fall of 2002 when she endorsed Bush and the neocons' Iraq vision. Hillary's health care plan is more conservative now than it was 14 years ago, she spent years helping reinforce the notion that free trade agreements are good and useful, and she has embraced, rather than rejected, the role of lobbyists in governance.
Perhaps Obama is guilty of some or all of these charges. But why single him out in a column, Krugman? By not pointing out how unprogressive Hillary is on the issues, he is doing his readers a significant disservice.
Krugman's other blind spot is more fundamental. Like many economic populists, he is inattentive to the importance of small-d democratic activism in the effort to implement progressive policy. The 30 years of neoliberal economic policy that Krugman now wants us to reject were enabled by the demobilization of the American citizen. Since the 1970s Americans' access to power has been steadily limited. Their voice and their role have been belittled and ignored by the entire media and political establishment.
Democrats have been especially guilty of this - particularly the Clintons. They have routinely and repeatedly, as a core political philosophy (see Paul, we Obama supporters really do care about that stuff), sought to conduct a top-down politics in which voters and Americans merely ratify decisions as quietly and submissively as corporate shareholders. To the Clintons, our role has been to give them the votes they feel they deserve, and shut up and go quietly along in the meantime.
This strategy backfired dramatically in 1994, when alienated Democratic activists stayed home as Republicans won the House. In the aftermath, the Clintons chose to embrace Republican ideas - precisely the charge Krugman levels at Obama - instead of push back against them. The 1990s should have been golden years for Democrats with a popular president and a strong economy - instead they were the hardest times the party had seen in 70 years.
After the Clintons left office in 2001 Democratic activists were left alone, unsupported by the party structure the Clintons had left, to rebuild the party's fortunes in the face of the nation's most dire crisis in many decades. Instead of helping promote these bottom-up, progressive reforms Hillary tried to sabotage them - first by voting for a war whose main goal was the creation of a permanent Republican majority at home and second by, as Ari Berman explains in the newest issue of The Nation, undermining Howard Dean and his 50 state strategy to the point of trying to keep him out of the DNC chairman's position.
In the current race, Hillary is arguing that whole states are irrelevant. As hekebolos and thereisnospoon have described in great detail her campaign has monkeyed with the democratic process in Nevada. They are, according to some reports, trying the same in Texas. They refuse to support new primaries in either MI or FL, trying instead to seat delegates won in undemocratic contests. And Hillary and her subordinates have routinely implied that if the voters do not ratify her "right" to the nomination she will go around them and try and force the superdelegates to do it instead.
Ironically, Hillary's approach to political philosophy is very deeply corporate. It is an upper management exec telling the folks in the cubes to show up when they are told and do as they are told. Dissent is neither encouraged nor welcomed.
Obama, on the other hand, has made the mobilization of new voters and a new movement the core of his campaign. Krugman disdains this by not discussing it, but that only shows how little Krugman understands about how economic and policy change will happen. Unless Americans are mobilized to become politically active, unless they are brought into the system, welcomed with open arms, and encouraged to remain a part of the process, the kind of progressive philosophies and goals we seek will NEVER come about.
Krugman doesn't seem to grasp that means and ends must be harmonious. A top-down corporate approach to politics is not going to somehow produce progressive outcomes. But a progressive, small-d democratic approach to politics is FAR more likely to achieve this.
For - and I want to close on this point - economic democracy requires political democracy. For progressive ideas and goals to be articulated and realized, as many Americans as possible must become participants in the process. When they are shut out or silenced or deemed unimportant, they lose the power to control their own lives and destinies, and one side effect is, as we have seen, rampant inequality.
Obama's campaign is one of the most progressive in modern memory - certainly in my lifetime. I cannot think of anything that reinforces progressive philosophies more strongly than bringing empowerment to the masses. Obama's campaign has mobilized millions of Americans to become active participants in the governance of their nation. That WILL outlast Obama. Win or lose, whether Obama betrays us or not, he has already produced a progressive achievement that we have been waiting 40 years to see.
