Obamabots: Not Our Enemy: Cut Them Some Slack

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242. An Incoherent Harper's Essay Suggests There's No Difference Between Obama and Republicans

An Incoherent Harper's Essay Suggests There's No Difference Between Obama and Republicans

Left-wing naivete about right-wing radicalism

BY MIKE KONCZAL

A Democratic president’s economic agenda is a failure, lost to business class acquiescence, the embrace of austerity, and an overall lack of vision.

This was the conclusion of The New Republic, summarizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal in May 1940. Though there were “extraordinary accomplishments” to acknowledge, the magazine understood that the New Deal was a “failure in the central problem.” That central problem was the economic question, and there, the Roosevelt administration had “fail[ed] to discover or apply a genuine remedy for the stagnation of our economy and for unemployment.” Beyond the failure of vision, it “heeded business advice, at least in part, by trying to cut recovery expenditures” and engage in other forms of austerity...In other words, being disappointed in Democratic presidents is what opinion editors refer to as “evergreen” content. It’s always ready to go, and always applicable with a built-in audience. With this in mind, political scientist Adolph Reed has a cover story in the latest Harper’s, Nothing Left (ungated), making the case against President Obama and for the idea that liberalism is currently exhausted.

Much of the text is focused on the well-rehearsed argument that President Obama is much more conservative than people understand...But Reed is making an argument that goes beyond the current Democratic Party, and there are three points worth exploring further.

Reed: “With the two parties converging in policy…”

This is the kind of stuff that drives liberals up the wall, and for good reason. The two parties at this point are pushing two very different, ideological visions of the role of the state and the market. Ignore, for a second, cuts and expansions. Conservatives want to privatize Social Security, while liberals want it to remain a public program. Conservatives want to turn Medicare into a coupon to buy health insurance on exchanges, while liberals want to use Medicare’s footprint to control health-care costs. Liberals see a greater role for the federal government, for instance in absorbing the costs of a major expansion of Medicaid. Conservatives want to turn everything over to the states where it will be easier to starve and replace with private control. These aren’t minor differences...States taken over by conservatives have waged an all-out war on workers, reproductive health, and public goods. Meanwhile liberal states and cities have moved to expand paid sick-leave, minimum wages, and reproductive health. Even the so-called culture wars have a hard economic edge. Reed dismisses feminism as a set of fake cultural politics. Yet health-care reform has eliminated “woman” as a pre-existing condition, and minimum wage hikes, which disproportionately benefit women of color, and equal pay are in the forefront.

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Reed: “....the areas of fundamental disagreements that separate (the two parties) become too arcane and too remote from most people’s experience to inspire any commitment, much less popular action.”

No. Just a casual glance out the window shows that the differences in policy have created massive popular actions. From the Tea Party organizing against expanding access to health-care and efforts to fight the recession, to undocumented workers organizing to pass immigration reform, the actual differences in play get people on the street.

There’s a genuine issue here for liberals. One positive thing that the New Republic saw in the New Deal back in 1940 was the idea that the changes in social insurance and labor laws were self-enforcing, and that “it is improbable that these more permanent changes will be or even can be destroyed by any new administration.” (They were half-right; labor was decimated seven years later under Taft-Hartley.)

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116962/adolph-reeds-harpers-essay-about-obama-naive-about-tea-party