Here's what a bad lefty political blogger I am: I hate the fucking bludgeon.
There's an old saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The idea behind the fucking bludgeon is that you catch more flies with a rolled up newspaper and a side of aerosol poison than with either.
I wrote a diary yesterday that had one of the most interesting comment sections I think I've invited in my five years here. My thesis was that Kucinich will come around, if his decisive vote is needed, for the right concessions. Many people agreed, others disagreed politely and productively. Some slammed Kucinich; some slammed anyone who would vote for HCR.
It's those slammers who I think have their heads screwed on wrong.
They think that the path to political success is cleared with the fucking bludgeon.
Markos (himself!) came in for some criticism and some applause in that comments section for his decision to start using the fucking bludgeon against Dennis Kucinich. Here's the logic, so far as I can put it into words: Kucinich is doing something that Markos (and many others, from the looks of things, as the herd has shifted direction) thinks is stupid and wrong. Now, how does one counter that?
There are more types of possible responses than you might think. One is temperate disagreement with Kucinich. That's no fun, even if it is admirably earnest. One problem with the tactic here is that Kucinich -- with whom I ultimately disagree about the bill -- actually has some pretty good points to make. Indeed, the best rebuttal I have to Kucinich is that he wants to get to the promised land with one jump where I think it needs to be done with a stepping stone -- that's not the sort of disagreement that seems to call for the fucking bludgeon.
Another possibility is to dismiss Kucinich, calling him a clown. It's a good approach in a lot of situations, but here I think that this suffers from the fact that he's just not really that clownish.
My approach -- saying that he's too smart to truly let the party down if he turned out to be the deciding vote -- is in some ways the most insidious and (my guess is) irksome to Kucinich, because (in my opinion) it's true. He's an agitator, but not a Naderesque bomb-thrower. He does give a damn about the fortunes of the Democratic Party. My approach was (rightly) called rude and insulting, but it's not very rude. If I didn't think that Kucinich was ultimately dependable in a pinch, I would like him much less.
And then there's Markos's approach: the fucking bludgeon. Kucinich delenda est -- "Dennis must be destroyed." No compromise, no respect -- just knuckle under, Kucinich, or we'll steamroll your scrawny self.
It may work -- although I think that you're more likely to get someone to go where you want them to go if you give them an escape route that leads them there. (This, you'll notice, is what my approach does. That's not why I'm doing it -- I happen to believe it -- but I'm aware that it has this very nice feature to it, and I like it.) The fucking bludgeon, by contrast, attempts to move people to where you want them to go by getting into a wrestling match with them and squeezing them until they cry for mama. The fucking bludgeon is a attack on another's potency. My sense is that, to an extent, whether it works is almost beside the point: what matters is that it's so satisfying to swing it at someone you don't like. Again, there are other weapons available -- but they don't lead to an opponent having to pick up his teeth from the ground.
Much of what I object to in politics, in fact, is the use of the fucking bludgeon. By and large I give Markos a pass, because his contribution to national political discourse is so huge simply by virtue of his commissioning polls that ought to have been commissioned and that shame other pollsters into doing their job well -- witness Gallup picking up on the voter enthusiasm measure -- that he's having a few screwy quirks is relatively unimportant. But I think I can convince you of the noxiousness of the fucking bludgeon with two words:
Rahm Emanuel.
My problem with Rahm Emanuel is not that he's a moderate, or even fundamentally anti-liberal. There are going to be people like that in our coalition (at least if it's going to be a majority coalition), and they are going to try to block what we do. I'm willing to take them on in a fair fight -- even one that is, as usual, tilted in their favor.
What I hate about Emanuel is that his tool of choice is the fucking bludgeon.
Now, look -- I'm no pie-eyed schoolchild. I am willing to use the fucking bludgeon against actual enemies, people who are not part of my political coalition, people who deserve all the disgrace they can shoulder. My problem with the fucking bludgeon is when it is used within the tent or against people who might make their way into that tend. I just think it's a lousy motivational strategy.
Rahm, though -- he loves the fucking bludgeon. He has what seems to me to be an almost psychosexual compulsion to see people submit to him. That's why, for all of his recent unfortunate loopiness, I fully credit Eric Massa's story about a naked birdlike Rahm accosting him in the shower, a story that will one day, I expect, achieve the iconic status of LBJ demanding someone (I don't recall whether it was an aide or a politician) to follow him into his bathroom so that LBJ could continue talking to him while taking a dump. Rahm was trying to win Massa's support -- which if he were thinking straight he would have known was not exactly up for sale at that precise moment -- by using the fucking bludgeon on him. Well, I'm willing to use the fucking bludgeon to stand against other people using the fucking bludgeon. Rahm offends me because he apparently believes that the way to get his leftist critics to shut up is to belittle and demean them. There's the fucking bludgeon. I'll stand against it for as long as I can stand.
(Small digression: the articles like this one in Slate that say that people who are upset at Rahm should really be upset at Obama because Rahm is just doing what Obama wants him to do miss the point. Yes, Obama wants Rahm, among other things, to protect his flank from the Left. Rahm has some excellent skills that any President would be happy to have at his disposal. But would Obama prefer that Rahm could figure out a way to do so without using the fucking bludgeon? I believe that he would. The problem with Emanuel is not simply content -- it's form. His overuse of the fucking bludgeon is why Obama probably still should get rid of him.)
Ronald Reagan supposedly used to say that "the secret of politics is easy. Tell the people how great they are and give them someone to hate." This applies not only to electoral politics, but to interest group politics such as this very blog and the movements with which it is associated. The idea is to build in-group cohesion: tell people how great they are and unify them against an external force. Now, I happen to think that this is a pretty great blog and a pretty great group -- and that, in our Republican opponents, we have an opposition that warrants hatred. (That's not because I love to hate; it's because I love my country and its political-philosophical patrimony -- and they want to ruin it. They are no better than dictatorial thugs, held back from the excesses we see in other countries simply because the inertia we've built against moving towards the sort of repressive state they want to see is so substantial. I just wish that we had as much inertia prevent our rolling towards kleptocracy.)
But the dismissive taunting towards people who are firmly within our coalition -- and yes, this does come from the "leftier than thou" among us too, as you can see from last night's comment section -- this just doesn't help things. If you, in effect, attack someone's potency (male or female) with the fucking bludgeon, you're not going to have a dialog worth having. You're going to have a pissing match -- maybe one hell of a pissing match -- but aside from getting your own side all worked up against another faction in your party you're not going to change minds within that faction. Ultimately, it's self-indulgent. And we don't have the luxury of giving in to self-indulgence, not with so much work to do.
So this is a plea for people who are disagreeing with others within our broad tent, or people whom we'd like to bring into that tent, not to pick up the fucking bludgeon as the instrument of first resort. Maybe -- maybe -- there may be times when it's the tool of choice, even within one's coalition. But in those cases, the people who wield it ought to be able to explain why they think that calling someone an idiot fuckwad is going to be the thing that motivates them towards the path of sanity and righteousness. If you don't have a really good answer to that, that should be a hint that the fucking bludgeon is not the tool you should be using.