[THS] !!!!!! David Michael Green: This Is Liberalism?

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24834.htm

This Is Liberalism?

By David Michael Green

February 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- You gotta hand it to the agents of
the regressive right for playing the weakest imaginable hand so well.

I’m talking about the Lee Atwaters and Frank Luntzs of the world, who both
understand human psychology (read fear) and are absolutely pitiless about
employing it for purposes of assisting the rich and powerful in raping the rest of us.

If you can get past the absolute amoral viciousness of these sociopaths, you have to
admire their handiwork at some level. (Oh, wait a minute: correction. Lee Atwater
actually did apologize for some of his crimes against humanity. Of course, it was on
his death bed.)

These guys are good. They understand the necessity of remaking the world when
the actual one we live in would never dream of embracing their destructive initiatives.
These guys could not only sell ice to Eskimoes, they could peddle dirt to an ant
colony. They could market garbage at the county dump. They could sell crap to the
local sewer district.

We know this, because they do it all the time. The entire regressive agenda is based
on lies, most of them both whopping in scale and utterly transparent to any remotely
sentient human being. How, then, has it succeeded so well these last thirty years?
There are many answers to that question, including, especially, the collapse in
confidence of alternative ideologies, the wholesale, marked-down-today-only, outright
purchase of the Democratic Party by corporate interests, and the stunning derogation
of duty by the mainstream media. But one key answer involves the work of these
masters at the marketing of deceit.

And one of their greatest achievements has been to pick up the whole ideological
playing field and move it about a thousand miles to the right. This is what I mean by
remaking reality. They’ve created a whole new normal. And in this new normal,
anything to the left of Dick Cheney is liberal, if not far left. And that, of course,
includes the hated Barack Obama sitting like some squatter in their White House.

As it happens, I hate Barack Obama, too. And my reasons for doing so are piling up
fast. But I would never mistake him for a liberal. And that, in fact, is one of the things
I most despise about this disastrous fool of a president. I couldn’t possibly care less
what happens to him, other than hoping for fate to return the favor after all he’s
done (and, especially, failed to do) to the country he promised to rescue. But I do
care about progressivism (or liberalism, if one prefers – I typically avoid that term
now that the Atwaters and Luntzs have turned it into something slightly less hated
than pedophilia), and I’m furious that this pathetic president and his horrid little
whorehouse of a political party, who are about as liberal as George W. Bush was, are
taking down the political ideas I care about with their own sinking ship.

By not refuting the false accusations that he is a liberal or even a socialist, and by
running an abysmal presidency, Obama has done as much as the scum on the right
in service to wrecking a set of ideas that are not only noble and correct, but are
desperately needed now by a country imploding under the weight of the regressive
politics which has been ascendant for thirty years now. Worst of all – and quite by
design – Americans are forgetting what any sort of progressive politics would even
actually look like. Orwell understood the significance of this phenomenon so well he
made it the existential nightmare of his protagonist, Winston Smith. All Winston
wanted to do was to hold onto some sense of a tangible reality. O’Brien, his torturer,
showed him what happens when power not only wants to win battles, but better yet
end them forever by eliminating the very opposing ideas people might embrace.

In that spirit, it’s well to remember what a progressive America might actually look
like, and how different that is from the botched abortion of bogus liberalism that is
supposed to be Democratic Party policy today.

Let’s start with what the Democrats – who, after all, control the government – should
have started with: the economy. People are miserable and frightened today because
they have so much job insecurity. The so-called liberals in Washington provided them
with a ‘jobs summit’ as a remedy. And then there was that amazing stimulus bill that
was one-third tax cut sop for Republicans (who still wouldn’t vote for it), mostly
otherwise pork barrel legislation for the benefit of members of Congress, and still too
small anyhow to do much good. The right has been apoplectic ever since, calling it
the socialist takeover of America. Hell, it wasn’t even remotely liberal. A real
progressive solution would have been big, and would have involved government
spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs, either directly on the
government payroll, or through incentives to the private sector. In reality, the
Democratic plan has failed to revive the economy – not because it was progressive
but, quite the contrary, because it wasn’t remotely so.

The same is true with respect to what got us into this mess. Conservative catechism
teaches that regulation is evil. Like Satan. And Saddam. Real progressives
understand that it is entirely necessary. Take it away and greedy pigs masquerading
as human beings will sell their own children for a buck, discounting them on a
volume deal if you buy the whole brood. Even after the experience of the Great
Depression, regressive predators couldn’t satiate their greed enough, so they
dismantled the regulatory structure of the mid-twentieth century that had brought
prosperity to so many Americans. That old system was real liberalism, ladies and
gentlemen. Calling what Obama or Bill Clinton have done by that name is an insult to
the intelligence of people everywhere (even in America, where it is so scarce). Clinton
was absolutely no less a friend to corporate America than Ronald Reagan, and
Obama has made zero serious attempt to outlaw the very practices that got us into
the economic nightmare we’re digging out from now, while simultaneously rescuing
the Wall Street pigs from the destructive fruits of their own greed. That’s liberal? Who
messed with my dictionary while I was napping?

The same is true of government spending. Obama is now proposing cuts to federal
spending, a pretty unliberal thing to do. He wants all those cuts to come from the
domestic side, and none at all from an astonishingly bloated military budget that
dwarfs the combined total of every other country in the world. A real progressive
would spend money on people, not on more weapons crack to feed the ‘defense’
contractors’ insatiable addictions. Now Obama is pushing his ‘bipartisan’ deficit-
cutting commission, to be led by Erskine Bowles, a Clinton hack, and Alan Simpson, a
Reagan-era regressive whack job. Guess how that’s gonna turn out?

Look at what supposedly constitutes ‘socialized medicine’ for another great example
of the total disconnect between rhetoric and reality that regressive mythmakers have
so successfully fabricated. The Democratic plan is a complete exercise in idiocy for
one reason and one reason only. It twists itself into pretzel-like contortions in order to
avoid confronting the simple basic problem at the core of the country’s health care
woes: the useless and parasitic private insurance industry inserted between the
public and their health care delivery. These racketeers provide absolutely no value
added whatsoever, but suck up one-third of every dollar spent on health care. What
a coincidence that we spend about exactly that much more per capita than any other
country in the world, and still die younger. A progressive plan would do what almost
every other developed country has successfully done for decades, and simply
nationalize health care. What the supposedly liberal/socialist Democrats are doing
instead is proposing to massively expand the great insurance scam by forcing thirty
or forty million Americans to buy insurance from these profiteers or get fined for
failing to do so. Sorry. That’s about as liberal as the electric chair. And about as
health-inducing too.

Energy policy provides another great example. Big Daddy Liberal in the White House
is running around the country nowadays flacking for nuclear power, proposing
billions in federal loan guarantees to underwrite a dangerous technology that is not
even economically feasible without government assistance. Jackson Browne must be
spinning in his grave, and he’s not even dead yet. If nuclear power is the liberal
answer to energy questions, then Sarah Palin is a giant of political philosophy. But
since Palin, The Great Defender Against Rampaging Ruskies, couldn’t tell Putin from
pet food, non-zombies amongst us can also agree that a liberal energy policy would
look a lot more like a giant national effort to develop alternative fuel sources than the
reinvigoration of the one kind of energy production liberals absolutely hate the most.

The question of civil liberties provides another spot-on example. Remember how the
elder Bush won office by trashing his hapless opponent as a card-carrying member of
the ACLU? Well, this White House has made almost no serious departures from the
human rights horrors promulgated by Junior Bush. Obama says we don’t torture.
Guess what? So did Bush. Obama says he wants to close Guantánamo, but hasn’t.
Guess what? So did the Cowboy Caligula. Obama has also kept and in some cases
extended a plethora of the Texas Torquemada’s policies, ranging from indefinite
detention to rendition for sub-contracted torture to state secrets to executive
authority and beyond. For all this – which is nearly identical to the little shop of
horrors that Cheney ran – Obama’s ‘liberal’ national security policies are being
regularly trashed by regressives as left-wing capitulation to terrorists, not least by the
monster himself, Dick “Dick” Cheney. You have to be insane to think this is liberalism.
I guarantee you they’re not popping champagne corks in the ACLU offices across the
country in celebration of the new respect-for-civil-liberties sheriff come to town.

It’s true that Obama and the Democrats have talked about ending Don’t Ask Don’t
Tell. That’s pretty impressive, eh? They’re so liberal that they’re now, er, coming up
right behind Colin Powell, Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now there’s a crop
o’ radical lefties for you. You could organize a pretty good Maoist revolutionary cell
with that lot, I’ll tell ya. And, of course, the emphasis remains on the term “talked
about”. That’s all he’s done so far. Obama also talked about closing Gitmo. In fact, he
promised us he would do it in a year. Didn’t happen. He talked about bringing new
transparency to Washington, especially in the health care negotiations. Didn’t
happen. He talked about leaning on the Israelis to stop building settlements in the
West Bank. They just built more and he did nothing. Are you getting the picture
here? Obama talking about civil rights for gays literally puts him on the same moral
and ideological plane as Dick Cheney, who – because his daughter is a lesbian –
actually has similar politics on this issue as the current president. Do I need to
mention that Ol’ Dick is not the most liberal fellow to be found in America?

But speaking of liberals, do you remember them ever clamoring for more war?
Remember back in the Nam days. Weren’t the liberals on the side of ending the war?
Remember in 2003. Weren’t liberals trying to block the Bush thugs from invading
Iraq? This president has massively escalated the American military presence in
Afghanistan, while also significantly increasing the use of drone missile attacks in
Pakistan. Maybe I need to lay off the Boone’s Farm for a little while, ‘cause I’m feeling
kinda confused. I always thought the liberals were the anti-war crowd.

We could go on and on here, folks. The current Democratic government in
Washington bears no resemblance whatsoever to liberalism. We know this, because
we know what a real progressive government would actually do. It would spend a
pile of money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. It would regulate economic
actors so that they served the public interest or were instead promptly disappeared.
It would create a universal, publicly-funded, national health care plan. It would
launch a major initiative to create a new alternative energy industry. It would
resurrect the Bill of Rights and restore human rights to the American legal system. It
would act immediately to guarantee that all people were subject to equal treatment,
regardless of their sexual orientation. It would be searching for political solutions to
the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing troops home, rather than escalating the war.

This is what real liberalism would look like in America today, and this is not remotely
comparable to what the so-called liberals in Washington are actually doing. None of it
is, let alone all of it.

It’s really quite amazing. First, because of how regressive Obama has turned out to
be. In all honesty, I cannot think of a single serious policy or action by this president
that could be genuinely called liberal, with perhaps the possible exception of
reversing the Republican clamp-down on stem cell research and on overseas abortion
counseling (yet he’s also been simultaneously selling out abortion rights at home in
legislating the health care debacle). I mean it. Obama may be a stylistic breath of
fresh air after Bush (but, then, a rotting corpse would be, too) – but substantively,
he’s little short of W’s third term. In fact, Bush was even more progressive than
Obama if you compare their two signature health care initiatives. One of those two
guys came up with a plan to massively increase government-provided benefits to the
public. (Shhh! That’s called socialism.) Guess, what? It wasn’t Obama.

But what’s really amazing is how Obama is broadly perceived as being a liberal. This
is just yet another framing victory by the right, and one of stunning proportions. By
erroneously tagging Obunkster with the bleeding-heart liberal moniker, they manage
to simultaneously tear him down, make liberalism unpalatable to the public, and shift
the center of political gravity so far starboard that even a right-wing president like
Obummer and his band of Democratic merry men become unacceptable because
they are insufficiently regressive.

Like I said, you have to admire these guys for their craft. You know. Just like you
have to admire the Holocaust for its good ol’ German efficiency.

Meanwhile, though, it’s scary that America has so little in the way of a real
progressive option in our politics.

It’s scary that those politicians who are today widely considered to be liberal are in
fact mostly deeply regressive.

And it’s scary that we keep following the same right-wing prescriptions, decade in
and decade out, even though they have done nothing but wreck the planet, wreck
the country, and wreck the lives of individual Americans.

But what is really scary is that we are now losing the capacity to even contemplate
what a progressive set of politics would look like. These ideas are now so
marginalized that people increasingly can’t even conceive of them anymore.

Orwell would be horrified.

Comrade O’Brien would be very proud indeed.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles
(dmg at regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow
him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net .