Peter Beinart has a new column up providing some much needed historical perspective on where we stand right now regarding President Obama - why Republicans and the Right Wing see him as a "Socialist" and why some activists on the Left see him as a disappointment.
Why Obama Disappoints the Left
"Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment," writes Eric Alterman in a mammoth new essay about the constraints that supposedly make a progressive presidency impossible. Well, count me among the few. A law guaranteeing near-universal health coverage is more than merely "significant;" it’s the fulfillment of a century-long progressive dream. And the Obama stimulus bill lavishes more money on liberal priorities than anyone dreamed possible in the Carter or Clinton years. Yes, Obama is wading deeper into Afghanistan and yes, his record on civil liberties is mediocre, but if that’s the acid test for a progressive president, then Franklin Roosevelt (Japanese internment), Harry Truman (loyalty boards that hounded many progressives out of government) and Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam) fail as well.
In truth, every president disappoints his base. "In the past few weeks, conservative and neo-conservative thinkers inside and outside the administration have reached a state of open disaffection with the Reagan administration’s policy directions," declared the Wall Street Journal in 1982. To this day, many conservatives insist that George W. Bush wasn’t really one of them. The complaints grow loudest when a president’s popularity declines, as Reagan’s did during the 1982 recession, and Bush’s did starting in 2005. When a presidency runs into trouble, activists rush to deny ideological paternity.
But let’s take today’s progressive activists at their word when they say Obama has let them down. Let’s assume they had every right to expect that he would enact a public option, pass a cap and trade bill, emasculate Goldman Sachs, close Guantanamo Bay and get America out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Why has he failed? The answer, I think, goes beyond the filibuster rule that creates a de facto, 60-vote threshold in the Senate. (It’s true that the filibuster is used more often today than during FDR and LBJ’s time, but back then, conservative committee chairman often kept progressive legislation from even reaching the Senate floor). And the answer goes beyond the influence of corporate money, although that clearly plays a role. The more fundamental difference between the Obama era and its New Deal and Great Society predecessors is this: Back then, progressives did not define the left end of the political spectrum. In the 1930s and 1960s, America featured honest-to-goodness alternatives to capitalism, home-grown radical movements that scared the crap out of the American establishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into arms of reformers like FDR and LBJ. Because our entire ideological spectrum has shifted right since communism’s collapse, reforms that once looked like centrist compromises now look like the brainchild of Chairman Mao.
...By 1935, FDR faced almost as much grassroots opposition from his left as from his right.
... In the mid-1960s, like the 1930s, a conservative-minded politician or businessmen could genuinely believe that if FDR or LBJ failed, something more radical would follow in their wake.
....
No one believes that today. There are vibrant progressive organizations, from Moveon.org to SEIU, but they are part of the Democratic Party; there is no powerful grassroots movement that stands outside the two-party system calling for revolutionary change. No one believes, as many did in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s, that if presidential reform fails, blood will spill in the streets. From Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, American progressivism has historically occupied what Arthur Schlesinger famously called "the vital center," a bulwark against the anti-democratic ideologies of both left and right. Except that today, powerful left-wing ideologies barely exist, and so large numbers of Americans can genuinely believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, if not a totalitarian. Luckily for them, and unluckily for progressives who want dramatic change, America no longer features the real thing.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
I can see it now - Huey Long would be very popular and FDR would be a corporatist sell-out, not a traitor to his class but their water-carrier.
How would Social Security be seen? Now, through the lens of history, its importance is clear but on the ground back then:
No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.
If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner's circle: farmworkers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.
Health care may follow that same trajectory.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...