The Left and Obama: What Path Forward Do They Propose?
While Democrats like Senator Chris Dodd are announcing they will not run for re-election, others contemplating changing from Democrats to Republicans or trying to decide whether or not they have a chance of getting re-elected come next November’s mid-term elections, the left-wing of the Democratic Party is having conniptions about why Obama is selling them out.
During the holidays, one of my few remaining left-wing friends went to several holiday parties. Everyone there, he told me, was complaining about how Obama had betrayed them by discarding the public option and increasing troop levels in Afghanistan (from which they favor unilateral withdrawal). My friend answered that he was not surprised, since Obama campaigned on Afghanistan being “the necessary war” that he his administration would win. That’s why he voted for a miniscule third party.
Ironically, while the hard Left sees Obama as a traitor to their cause (“We elected him,” they continually argue, “yet he has betrayed us.”), the hard Right sees the President as a Manchurian candidate, dedicated to creating a socialist or communist America by stealth means. Aaron Klein of World.Net Daily is co-author of a book to be published in a few months, called The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists. I am fairly sure that Klein will be able to show that in his past, Obama indeed did have such ties, particularly in his student and Chicago days.
But I remain skeptical that as President today- whatever milieu he grew up in and whatever movements he sympathized with or belonged to- he is now consciously acting as a secret radical trying to enact the agenda of those he hung out with in years past. David Horowitz makes a similar argument about Obama’s ties to the late guru of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. He has written a short essay titled Barack Obama’s Rules For Revolution:The Alinsky Model, available for purchase here.
Horowitz argues in his article that as President, he learned the “strategy of deception” that Alinsky openly advocated and is using that strategy as Chief Executive to achieve his radical agenda through the back door. I agree that Barack Obama is undoubtedly the most left-wing President our nation has had, and that his policies are likely to push America in the direction of European social-democracies, most of which are struggling under the burden of unsustainable entitlements.
But I am not completely convinced by Horowitz’s argument, that Obama is the embodiment of of Alinskyism. Certainly the President at one time was a protégé of Alinsky’s, and worked as a committed member of a group that adhered to his principles. But as President, even if he once hoped that he could use his office to enact such an agenda, he has come up against the realities of our political system and its economic framework, and finds himself constrained by these realities. If Obama’s goal is still socialism or the “revolution,” as Horowitz thinks, he is not making much headway. At any rate, I urge PJM readers to buy a copy of Horowitz’s booklet, and decide for yourself whether or not you find it convincing.
When Obama hoped to save the economy from crashing; he turned to Wall Street. Military realities had him increasing levels in Afghanistan and continuing many of President Bush’s policies. If anything, his kowtowing to despots and his appeasement of the Iranian mullahs has only worked to reveal his inexperience, and has hurt his popularity and his appeal. On the domestic front, he campaigned for the public option and told audiences he favored the single-payer system, the program favored by the Left as the road to socialized medicine a la England and Canada. But as President, he found that this was unobtainable, readily scuttled it and is now trying to put over an unpopular and deeply flawed alternative behind closed doors that both Left and Right oppose, and of which the political center is skeptical.
That is why, in the Washington Post, left-wing columnist Harold Meyerson, an avowed democratic socialist, bemoans the failure of today’s Left to create a social and political movement that will succeed in pushing the President towards the leftist future they fear he has abandoned. Why are they failing, Meyerson asks? His answer: “The absence of a vibrant left movement.”
As Myerson sees it, thinking obviously of FDR’s “second New Deal” which saw the passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the growth of unionism, and the passage of Social Security, a new surge forward necessitates precisely what took place in the 1930’s, such as “mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers’ groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories.” And, he notes, “both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression.”
Actually, as Meyerson knows, it was only the Communists who became the left-wing of the New Deal; his own beloved Socialist Party of Norman Thomas was a small and ineffective organization, most of whose members deserted its ranks and became liberal New Dealers. And what Meyerson ignores, and what the late socialist historian James Weinstein showed in an important book, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, most of the major social reforms like social security had the support and guidance of large corporations, who favored stability and regulation to prevent a real radical upheaval. I argued much the same about the kind of labor and other social reforms Meyerson thinks were the result of popular struggles, in an essay I wrote decades ago about the conservatism of the actual New Deal, which can be downloaded here, or as a PDF here. (Pay special attention to the data I provide about the major large corporations who supported and lobbied for the Social Security Act.)
Meyerson also argues that it was the civil rights movement, which he notes was led by avowed socialists like Martin Luther King and James Farmer, that pushed Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy to pressure a reluctant Congress to “enact fundamental reforms.”
I would make two points in response to that argument. There was a mass civil rights movement, but it was one predicated on using the tactic of non-violence to challenge America to realize the promise of our democracy. Moreover, as recent scholars have shown, the Establishment saw the necessity for civil rights, if the Cold War propaganda of the Soviet bloc that portrayed the entire nation as a racist enclave was to be defeated. And King and Farmer who were undoubtedly privately socialists of one sort of another, never made their economic views public or argued on the behalf of a socialist program.
So Harold Meyerson calls for “autonomous, vibrant mass movements.” Unfortunately for him, one does exist today, and as you guess, he is anything but happy about it. This is because it is the Tea Party movement, that so irritates the Left, whose spokesmen condemn it as “right-wing populism” gone mad. But without a counterpart on the left, Meyerson worries that “Congress isn’t feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama’s agenda.”
As for the Right, he says that its movement has had “great success,” but “isn’t really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans.” Meyerson claims to speak for the real people; who want what he earlier says is Obama’s true desires: “health care for all, financial re-regulation, climate-change legislation and a Keynesian stimulus to revive a wounded economy.” But instead of a new “progressive era,” we have “right-wing pseudo populism.”
Mr. Meyerson does not understand, evidently, that common people do not want cap and trade that will decrease jobs and take money from their pay checks for high priced utilities; nor do they want a stimulus that helps the banks and corporations and does little for Main Street.
So how does Meyerson hope to gain his desired mass movement? Not by community organizing as practiced by the ACORN types. No, he asks instead that it be created by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann! I kid you not. After all, he thinks the tea parties were created by Glenn Beck, who actually moved to support them after local groups started them on their own. His own group on the democratic Left are too busy working in the higher echelons of journalism and the academy, I think, to be bothered with actual organizing efforts of those they purport to lead. So it seems he prefers to write a column and ask his favored media figures to do the work for him.
In past years, Harold Meyerson was a member of the democratic socialist group led by Michael Harrington and whose intellectual star was Irving Howe. Were these men still alive, they would have been horrified to read Meyerson’s column. Harrington and Howe may have had wrongheaded ideas, but they were serious people who eschewed all forms of populism. I knew Harrington and Howe well, and to them and Meyerson I say, “you are no Harrington and Howe.”
So if today’s Left has to depend upon Maddow and Olbermann to do its work for them, I think conservatives have little to worry about.
“Everyone there, he told me, was complaining about how Obama had betrayed them by…increasing troop levels in Afghanistan (from which they favor unilateral withdrawal).”
Pay attention. This is very important. It may even behoove you to reread this comment a number of times. The Left took it for granted that Barack Obama was lying about Afghanistan. He simply had to lie to the rubes to get their votes. They assumed that this would be among the first promises he broke after entering the White House. Does anyone also remember when economist Austan Goolsbee told Canadian officials to ignore Obama’s campaign rhetoric regarding free trade? He tried to calm their fears by saying the presidential contender was merely lying to the blue collar Democrats of states like Ohio.
Democratic Party leaders usually attended the “best” universities where they learned how to squeeze the truth, bend it, and do all sorts of other nasty things to it. Bill Clinton is the quintessential example of this mindset. He is the one who deceived the American public by claiming he never had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton later explained that he didn’t have real sex with her. Oral sex wasn’t supposedly the real deal. Democrats lie at a drop of a hat. Yes, Republicans admittedly often also lie—but they feel guilty about it! Republicans are sinners. That’s bad enough. The leftists, however, possess a postmodernist approach to truth. This is much worse. Democrats lie without hesitation. They rationalize their vile behavior by believing the unwashed masses can’t handle the truth. We must be lied to for our own benefit. They are truly arrogant and pseudo-educated jerks.
“But as President, even if he once hoped that he could use his office to enact such an agenda, he has come up against the realities of our political system and its economic framework, and finds himself constrained by these realities. If Obama’s goal is still socialism or the “revolution,” as Horowitz thinks, he is not making much headway.”
I’m not so sanguine. Despite his front-door failures involving Congress, through the back door Obama has quietly repealed all union financial disclosure requirements, insisted on the unionization of all Fedrally-funded projects, and promised (in writing) to unionize the Federal workforce by Executive Order- this is the “patronage army” the Dems were crowing about after their private meeting in Williamsburg last winter. What Obama envisions- and is successfully bringing about- is a nationwide version of the Chicago Machine, but one which is dominated not by the Mob but by the Marxists. The SEIU is not your father’s union: unlike the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters who made the Grand Bargain with FDR, the Stern Gang is devoted to the old red unionism of Eugene Debs and the Wobblies.
Even in Congress Obama has succeeded in one of his principal goals- to so bankrupt and wreck the United States economy that the populace will beg the Planners to “save” them; but he is having even more success through the Fed’s quiet mass purchases of Treasury securities- a thinly disguised exercise in Weimar money-printing. “Inflation and taxation are the millstones between which we will grind the bourgeoisie.”
“Finally, the rich were not to be taxed to help pay for the program.”
A viable society must do what it can to prevent large corporations from gaming the system for their own benefit. It was outrageous that these business leaders supported FDR’s social security legislation. But there is something that Ron Radosh overlooks: ultimately the employees would pay just about the total cost for their benefits—in one way or another. It matters little how much you tax the wealthy. There are simply not enough of them! You could tax people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett every dime they ever earned. That might get you .00001% of the annual funds required to run the program. Employers also do not pay anything for one’s social security benefits. They just decrease the other types of your overall compensation to make up the difference.
I am of the same mind as Bohemond. I perceive no evidence that the Obama Team finds itself “constrained by the realities of our political system and its economic framework”. It finds itself delayed, possibly, irritated by an earlier and larger scale arousal of open resistance from middle class voters than it antcipated, but not deterred.
The team in the White House is not Obama’s. He is theirs. From the day that Bill Ayers and the hard core of Chicago Stalinist socialists realized that this cool charmer could be their cover man for a giant sting, they have worked,Daley machine style, for this day. They knew that, as Norman Thomas is said to have said, “Americans will never knowingly vote in a Socialist Government”. So they scammed the voters.
Aware that their window of opportunity will be brief, they have created a lend of the Kremlin and Chicago politics. Lie. Cheat. Threaten. Kick in the crotch. Kick in the head. Pay off. Make deals. Bypass any legislative obstacle. Ignore the law. From the day they took over the Oval Office, they have left legislative matters to their loyal lackeys, while concentrating on building a Palace Guard of loyal radical Marxists, to CHANGE us into a Socialist Republic. It is clearly evident that they are committed to Rule by Dictat. The proletariat is opposed to their healthcare proposals: make a deal behind closed doors, and ram it through with paid-off votes. What constraints? Who cares what’s in the act? We can turn it over to the bureaucrats and they’ll do whatever we tell them to do. Polls show that climate change legislation is going to run into serious resistance – we’ll just have the EPA do it by regulation.
?The new communists have found that that they can take over the government and reshape the economy, not by control of production plants,and service and utility companies, but by controlling consumption. Go ahead: build cars, but you must build them this way. Go ahead: generate electricity, but don’t emit any carbon dioxide. Go ahead: eat all you want, but we’ll tell you what kind of fats, and how much. Go ahead: we’ll provide the doctor, but we”ll decide when you die.
The “reality” of their politics is, “We won. You lost. We don’t intend to let you have any voice. If we can’t get what we want by legislation, we’ll do it by fiat – just like the UN and the EU. And watch your big mouth if you know what’s god for you!”
There is nothing nuanced in their methodology. There will be no back-pedalling. jst jamming and staffing. If you think that losing control of the congress this year is going to halt the juggernaut of their embedded bureaucracy, you’re naive.
Obama doesn’t care about YOU – or our constitution, free-enterprise system, or culture. He just wants his dreams from Bill Ayers.
This all makes complete sense to me. I am with Radosh not Horowitz on this. To Radosh, I wonder what is happening with Martin Sklar whose take on it all you outlined a while back. As a big fan of Sklar’s work, and because of John Judis’s apparently laughable misreading of Sklar, I still would like to hear more of his analysis. Has he provided it anywhere?
There are two major groups that threaten our freedoms and economic vitality. Saul Alinsky represents the first one. He consciously deceived well-meaning and gullible people like Jacques Maritian into thinking he was advocating some sort of Judeo-Christian economic system. Alinsky was essentially a Marxist. However, we should not overlook the Progressive movement whose leaders included Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Herbert Hoover. Both men were benevolent and desired more power because they were convinced the common folk simply lacked the ability to handle their own affairs. Their formal education had prepared them to become the top managers of society. They had virtually nothing to do with Karl Marx!
Take a look at this brief video where comedian Stephen Colbert interviews Jonathan Cohn:
http://tinyurl.com/lzhugn
Cohn is truly a dangerous man. I doubt very much if he ever explicitly embraced Marxism. The guy probably ran the other way when approached by campus radicals during his years at Harvard. They were probably perceived as too extreme. No, Cohn is an American Progressive—like most of his friends at The New Republic including Marty Peretz. He is warm and cuddly. Every mother wants her daughter to marry such a wonderful guy. The dude definitely helps old ladies walk across the street. He and his buddies only want to be our benevolent dictators. Their hearts are so filled with compassion.
…he prefers to write a column and ask his favored media figures to do the work for him.
Very much like a liberal. They love to suggest ideas & look to others to do the actual work. Then, they claim the credit for whatever success the idea has & ignore the negative consequences.