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    It's Not About The Right and The Left

    By Michael Maiello on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 11:13am |

    I just watched Claire McCaskill make a ridiculous statement on "Meet The Press," where she accused the "extremes" on the right and left of dominating the current economic debate and called for new and louder moderate voices of compromise.

    The left has had no voice in this debate whatsoever.  Claire McCaskill doesn't speak for the left. President Obama barely allows himself to speak to the left, much less for it.  Bernie Sanders is not even a loud voice in the economic debate.

    There are plenty of reasons for this, but just to prove the point that the right is driving this debate, we're arguing not over whether or not to cut the budget, but over what to cut.  We're not even debating how much to cut.  It seems like Obama and the Republicans both want to cut north of $3 trillion over 10 years.  We're talking about balanced budget amendments and a dollar of cuts for every dollar of additional debt raised.  Those are right wing ideas.  Absent from the discussion are:

    1) No cuts until we reach full employment.

    2) Lower the eligibility ages to collect full Social Security and Medicare benefits, in recognition of the fact that some people over 60 are going to have a hard time finding work.

    3) A clean debt ceiling increase.

    4) Real foreclosure mitigationand government incentives to help the private sectors, both individuals and businesses, retire debt.

    Those are four lefty ideas.  None of them are considered with the same validity or are expressed at the same volume as Tea Party ideas.  McCaskill is wrong.  The extremes are not fighting.  Moderates from both parties are debating with Tea Partiers.  The left doesn't even have a seat at the table.  That's the problem.  Bring us into the debate and maybe we can get somewhere, since a lot of lefty ideas would poll well, were they honestly presented.

     

    Comments

    I agree, des, except that Bernie is speaking out. Here he is on the floor of the senate on Sat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmbO_ztr_vU&feature=youtu.be

    I am so pissed that we are having to deal with suicide bombers within our own congress. The president has to accept SOME of the blame for them being elected in 2010, but mostly I blame low/no-information voters, pissed off dems and indies that allowed themselves to lash out and let their emotions override their brains, and faux news.

    2012 will tell us what kind of lessons we have learned from this. If we elect even MORE teahadists, we'll know the majority of the country is good with this kind of behavior.


    by stillidealistic on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 11:48am

    Great post, as usual, destor.  Establishment Democrats are congenitally incapable of placing blame squarely where it lies.  And I'm still waiting for anyone in the lamestream media to state this simple fact about this debt ceiling charade:  Never, in the hundred or so vote history on this issue, has raising the debt ceiling been held hostage to demands that significant policy concessions be made in exchange. 


    by brewmn on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 11:52am

    If the "compromise" that is reputedly taking shape comes to pass, this might be the Waterloo for the Third Way wing of the Democratic Party.  For a couple of decades now, that group has pursued policies at odds with the views of the rank and file comprising the majority of the party.  They have been able to succeed by promoting the message that only by working in coalition with Wall Street and corporate power, and adopting a more small-government, free market agenda, could Democrats successfully defend their progressive legacy programs against all-out assault.

    But it now appears these would-be pragmatists are incapable of defending progressive and activist government in almost any form whatsoever, and have absorbed so much of the conservative anti-government agenda that they can't even mount a rhetorical challenge to austerity-mongers in an environment dominated by massive unemployment, stagnation and financial sector depredations.


    by Dan Kervick on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 12:13pm

    Excellent point about her comment.

    The reason the tea party is at the table is because they showed they had the ability to influence primary elections, and then general elections.  If some green party popped up and altered the House in the same way in 2012, then the left would be at the table.  No one is going to bring them into the debate.  If the left wants a seat or two at the table, they are going to have grab it like the tea party folks did. 

    It is more difficult for those on the left to do so, given the host of conventional wisdom and memes about the country being center right, etc., combined with the politicians naturally leaning towards policies and approaches that will make their corporate donors happy.  Like minorities in the workplace, the lefties have to work twice as hard to get the same result as activists on the right.  Probably even more than twice as hard.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 9:29am

    Today's new Gallup poll gives an indication as to why this path to a seat at the table is so difficult:

    Among Democrats, twice as many identify themselves as conservative (18%) than those who identify themselves as very liberal (9%).  On the flip side with the Republicans, seven times as many identify themselves as very conservative (21%) as opposed to those who identify themselves as liberal (3%). 


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 10:09am

    I would identify myself as either a social democrat or a democratic socialist - but not a liberal.


    by Dan Kervick on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 2:21pm

    Those first two were not options in the poll.  If you had to choose between 'very conservative,' 'conservative,' 'moderate,' 'liberal,' or 'very liberal,' which one would you choose.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 2:41pm

    None of the above.

    Some people would choose one of the labels.  But the fact that people are being forced by the political punditocracy to insert themselves into silly, out-of-date pigeon holes is one reason why we have such a poor understanding of what people think.

    I have two friends who would both probably describe themselves as "very conservative" but who think we should be sending more Wall-Streeters to jail and taxing away giant financial sector salaries.  Go figure.   A lot of people call themselves "conservative" because they hate liberals, and "liberal" is for them synonymous with "upper-class elitist".   So what do these labels mean any more?

     


    by Dan Kervick on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 3:42pm

    They pretty much mean what they have always meant - some rough ballparky idea of where people perceive themselves to be.  If some liberal hates the word liberal enough to call themselves conservative, then a politician with the brand of liberal on him or her will have a harder time getting their vote, etc. 

    I know a few people who like to say they are liberal, but when one gets them talking on issues from gay marriage to foreign policy, they are actually quite conservative.  So there is probably some balancing out of the "conservative" who is really liberal phenomenon.

    So the question: Lincoln Chaffee a liberal or a conservative?

    I suppose one runs down all the lists of policy positions - environment, foreign policy, education, economic stimulus package, etc etc, and if one tends to generally agree with the liberals, then one is a liberal, agree with the conservatives mainly, then conservative.

    Of course a very conservative individual can be pro-life based on religious beliefs or pro-choice from a strictly libertarian stance.  So the labels in the end don't say how people feel about particular policies or legislation.  But without some broad labels such as these, one cannot make any broad, general assertion about the nation.  And yet we see the nation as particular entity, made up smaller, overlapping entities, and is itself part of larger entities.  And so on.  There is no label for groups and subgroups the size we are talking about where they will be perfectly descriptive.  Even any two Socialist Democrats can differ greatly on any particular issue.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 3:58pm

    It seems to me that you are just demonstrating that these labels "mean" absolutely nothing.   You say you know some people who call themselves liberal, but are "actually" conservative.  In what sense?  In your own private idiolectical sense of "conservative".  I could just as well say that someone who is a staunch defender of laissez faire government is actually a liberal.   Many people have come to hate the word "liberal" because it is a stupid, mushy word connoting stupid, mushy thinking.


    by Dan Kervick on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 4:04pm

    Just because these labels are not perfect, doesn't mean they have no value.  The current debate/fight going on in DC has to do with the role of government.  One can reasonably make the assertion that the conservative view on the role of government is that it should be very very small (with conservatives bickering amongst themselves as to how small), whereas the liberal view see a large role for government.  If someone calls themselves a liberal, chances are they are for a new stimulus package.  A conservative one could bet is against a new stimulus package.  Liberals are more it takes a village and conservatives are more pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

    I could on and on providing examples. There are also certain issues and policies that crosses this particular division of ideology.  But in the end there are some generally accepted notions about liberalism and conservativism in this country.

    (And one can find stupid, mushy thinking under the heading of any political ideological slant. Just as one can find astute and clear thinking.)

    Describing the political slants and views of a nation as large and diverse as America is an inexact science mixed with an elements of the arts.  It won't ever be perfect.  A poll such as the gallup's is not the only tool one uses.  It is one of a whole shed full of tools one uses to get a sense and understanding of where people are at in their perceptions of themselves (and also their sense of terms such as liberal).

    Of course, one can not engage in such political speculation (and yes that is all it is, speculation based on the various data which has varying degrees of accuracy) and call it all about nothing. And of course, such a person might not find much interest at a place such as Dagblog.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 4:35pm

    It's hard for me to believe that these labels have much remaining meaning when they are self-applied throughout the Democratic Party in a manner that is not that far from a purely random distribution.  That suggests to me they are just left-over, loosely pinned identity tags from some earlier convention of the dead, that have survived into an intellectually decadent and incoherent present.

    In any case, this kind of process-obsession and compulsive poll-watching and temperature taking of the body politic is a self-reinforcing phenomenon that has bequeathed us a Democratic Party run by vapid political professionals without any pronounced moral core or discernable agenda.  Thus we are given the spectacle of the sad empty shell named "Barack Obama", who has seemingly tried to build an entire personal religion out of being as inoffensive and agreeable as possible, attempting to navigate through the turbulent waters of a budget debate without any clear sense of where he is trying to end up.

    You can't even hate the man, since he is just so pathetically lost and feeble.  Has ever a politician been so tragically wedded to the security blankets of the status quo, and so determined to make sure that nothing he does sticks out as the least bit dangerous or challenging?  Ironically, even his strategy of extreme safety doesn't work, because people end up being offended by his vanilla nothingness.

    We need to have a serious and contentious debate in the Democratic Party over the next year, hopefully sparked by a passionate challenger for the nomination, so that Obama's nihilistic conservatism can at least be forced to square up against people with some kind of heart and real commitment.


    by Dan Kervick on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 7:21pm

    If it were just polls, then it would be meaningless. But these meaningless polls over labels seem to be reflected in real elections and real power. Two questions:

    • Why do so few people consider themselves liberal?
    • Why do liberals have such little power in Washington?

    Are the two related? Not necessarily, but I certainly wouldn't dismiss the correspondence out of hand.


    by Michael Wolraich on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 10:22pm

    Good point about tea-baggers and the left.

    Tea-baggers put the effort out to be heard in both primary and general election and now command a seat at the table. Whereas, liberals put their faith in their elected officials are are dismayed when they don't live up to the left's expectations. Because they don't have a point-of-presence in Washington they're easily dismissed.


    by Beetlejuice on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 11:48am

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