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Unity, Evolution Gotta Come

By Spencer Ackerman

Ben Branzel, Elizabeth Jacobs, and my friends Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein are teaching us about social democracy. Join them, won't you?

Elizabeth Jacobs: The New Deal in popular memory was a time of greater solidarity. But was it the case, actually? Public opinion was a messy business back then, so it's hard to say. But. People seemed just as socially schismatic and individualistic in the 1930s as today. "Many of the poor and lazy class do not want work," said some Ohio housewife in 1936. So how did we end up with the New Deal? Because FDL "had an idea of what he wanted to do and worked hard to get it done" and through wily and ruthless coalition politics. Political leadership is what matters. 

Ben Branzell: Barack Obama is cool and all, but the important thing is to build a movement and now I will explicate that through a convoluted booster-rocket outer-space metaphor that I probably shouldn't have bothered with. "We'd be kidding ourselves if the candidate Obama who talked about bringing ... everyone together, when he becomes president of the country" won't have a seat at the table, and that includes the assholes. There's this thing called "Oh No You Don'" organizing that helps activists tap into opposition-politics over impeachment/the war/FISA gutting; won't be sufficient in an era of progressive governance. 

Chris Hayes: Blah blah blah I am soooo smart. Conservatives blow. There is no constituency for conservative destruction of government. As a result, they "burrow like a termite" into government infrastructure, hollowing it out so, while government grows unchecked, it grows more venal, incompetent and upwardly redistributive of wealth. I AM ALSO VERY EXCITED! The pillars of future progressive governance are/should be: health care for all, and a new-energy economy. But the way Washington works is to bribe interest groups using public coffers. "There's gonna be some bribery that's gonna happen," but we also need "the bullying model. And that's to beat the crap out of the energy lobby and to beat the crap out of the medical lobby." Bring the force of public opinion to counterbalance interest-group pressure on congress. I'm optimistic that the last 10 years of transformed liberal activism has the potential for doing so. We'll need a good cop/bad cop model.

Ezra Klein: I like the model of coalition politics. You see how the angles are played -- but this also means that GOPers have a direct incentive to making Democratic administrations fail, as with Kristol's famous 1994 "at all costs" health-care memo. No one's figured out the angles for how to stop this. We need to get rid of the politics of fear -- GOP exploits it to cower Democrats into submission.

posted at 1:21 pm on July 20, 2008 by Allahpundit

If it is true, as yesterday’s three-decker front-page headline in the New York Times had it, that “U.S. Considering Stepping Up Pace of Iraq Pullout/ Fall in Violence Cited/ More Troops Could Be Freed for Operations in Afghanistan,” then this can only be because al-Qaida in Iraq has been subjected to a battlefield defeat at our hands—a military defeat accompanied by a political humiliation in which its fanatics have been angrily repudiated by the very people they falsely claimed to be fighting for. If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about “the hunt for the real enemy” or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time.

That first sentence was echoed by Maliki himself in the Spiegel interview but, curiously enough, most of the U.S. media’s coverage of the story glossed over it. As for Afghanistan, Obama told CBS this morning that the situation there is grave enough that we can’t wait for the next president to take office before doing something about it. See this post at the Nation for an example of which way leftist sentiment is trending on what that “something” should be. Exit quotation: “[E]ven though the cover of the latest edition of Time magazine refers to the fight in Afghanistan as ‘The Right War,’ and even though Obama seems to have bought into this particularly dangerous variation Washington-insider spin, there is nothing right or smart about deepening the US troop commitment in a country that has a long history of thwarting the best-laid plans of great military powers.”

By fu bush3July 20, 2008 - 1:04pm