Dan,

The distinction you make is fair, and it's certainly no proof that Obama isn't "moving to the middle" that he refrained from tossing Clark overboard. But I want to distinguish between (1) questions of substantive and legitimate concern about Obama's practices and positions (the alarm bells for me are the AIPAC pander on perpetual unification of Jerusalem and the apparent rightward swerve of his foreign policy team, insofar as we know who they are) and (2) rushing to judgment on Obama's trajectory across the board.

In this brief post I was addressing (2), the danger of overgeneralizing about Obama, as if it were self-evident that a new gestalt was forming, hardening--"he's the new pander bear." That's too simple.

I'm keeping my eyes on what's happening in his foreign policy universe and will be writing about this--writing critically and, I hope, in an informed way.

TG

Posted at July 2, 2008 2:44 PM in response to Obama's Refusal to Guillotine--Where's the "Rush to the Middle"?

Libertine, a little artfulness--and accuracy--on your part would help. I didn't say "inartful" was accurate, only that it was a refusal to guillotine.

Posted at July 2, 2008 8:08 AM in response to Obama's Refusal to Guillotine--Where's the "Rush to the Middle"?

Please don't get over it.

Posted at July 2, 2008 8:04 AM in response to Obama's Refusal to Guillotine--Where's the "Rush to the Middle"?

Crowmeat,

Interesting conjecture, but the website makes clear that voluntary caps are not the kind he has in mind:

A climate cap-and-trade mechanism would set a limit on greenhouse gas emissions and allow entities to buy and sell rights to emit, similar to the successful acid rain trading program of the early 1990s. The key feature of this mechanism is that it allows the market to decide and encourage the lowest-cost compliance options.

How Does A Cap-And-Trade System Work?

A cap-and-trade system harnesses human ingenuity in the pursuit of alternatives to carbon-based fuels. Market participants are allotted total permits equal to the cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

My boldface.

Posted at June 18, 2008 11:36 AM in response to Does John McCain Know What He's Talking About? (And Who Cares?)

But Steve, unlike the other shrinking violets you cite, McClellan was out there every day for months, showing his face, pushing his words, parroting Bush, Rove & Co. What did he know and when did he know it? (See Joe Cutbirth at HuffPost, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cutbirth/hey-scotty-fool-us-once-s_b_103966.html) Why get him off the hook without a careful explanation? How did scales fall from his eyes, and when, and what did he do about it? The corruption of daily politics is of course immense, but in my book a person who stands up and spouts complete garbage is more culpable than someone who plays along backstage.

Posted at May 29, 2008 5:15 PM in response to Scott McClellan Gives Voice to his "Inner Lawrence Wilkerson"

As I wrote in my 2005 response to Thomas Frank, it's a mistake--and condescending, in fact--to think guns and religion aren't "real" to the people who believe in them. Whatever you want to say about Obama, it is an overwhelming stretch to impute such a claim to him. (Or to Hillary either, for that matter.)

Posted at April 13, 2008 4:55 PM in response to Maul Game

Otto F,

I don't see how you can say that "Obama gave us a glimpse of how he really thinks." The man has been going to church regularly for 20 years, and insofar as you ever know what somebody "really thinks," the reasonable assumption is that he doesn't "really think" that "clinging to religion" is a mistake. The most reasonable assumption is that he meant that "voting as some of the more reactionary churches think they should vote" is a product of "bitterness."

The gotcha game only makes sense when the gaffe stands for a pattern. I don't see the pattern.

Posted at April 13, 2008 4:50 PM in response to Maul Game

Thanks for the tip about archive oblivion. While the tech-heads are figuring out what to do about this glitch in the new software, I'll take the liberty (and an inordinate expanse of square inches) to post my "Fundamentals and Interests: An Open Letter to Thomas Frank" from July 26, 2005, followed by Frank's reply:

------------------------------------------------

Dear Tom,

I haven’t passed much time in Kansas in my life. What do I know? In the fall of 1965, I made my first foray into the state—to K. U., of course, to give a talk against the Vietnam war. The fellow who drove me around Lawrence showing me the sights and regaling me with his impressive knowledge of the ins and outs American left-wing history later surfaced as an FBI informant. Shows what I know about Kansas.

So I can’t quarrel with the particulars of your tale. I’m also going to leave aside the many pleasures of your book—the character portraits, tours of the endless horizon, twitting of Republican fools, hilarious take-downs of the Bible Belt booboisie and its junior partners in the wackotariat. In my high school years I was a big fan of Mencken’s, too, and believe me, it wasn’t easy to reconcile my budding socialism and my budding snottiness. (No less an expert in such vexed reconciliations than my former friend Christopher Hitchens used to tell me that his biggest challenge as a writer was overcoming snobbery.) But I think you have some of the same trouble reconciling your affection for class sincerity with your disaffection from the actually existing members of the class that bears the redemptive mission.


You’ve done a service by sharpening the debate about where we go from—gag—here, so everything I say from here on out needs to be considered against your excellent service certificate. Let me start with a question. Why would it be unfair to call your book the cleverest piece of vulgar Marxism ever written? It would be no small compliment. The competition is stiff, or at least the entries are myriad. Whole stacks of university libraries are filled with analyses to the effect that the workers would rise—or would have risen, or might someday rise—were it not for the false consciousness (you call it “derangement”) with which they are sadly, thoughtlessly, manipulatively afflicted. It’s one hell of a genre. A lot of it is very erudite—most of the Frankfurt school, for instance. It even includes some great songs—consider “Pie in the Sky” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” for openers. You win, hands down.

The big trouble is with your deep premise, which first shows up on the way from page 1 to page 2: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests.” The point crops up a few hundred more times in your pages.

The problem lies in those glimmering words, “fundamental,” “interest,” and “wrong.” What’s a fundamental interest anyway? You appear to be a pure utilitarian. People ought to be rational calculators, dammit. They may not live by bread alone but when they get stampeded into church by bakery tycoons they should realize they’re being taken for a ride—nothing more. But Marx thought more of religion than that. Religion for him was, after all, “the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions…the opium of the people." That’s potent stuff. An opiate of the people gets you high. People get excited about it. They care about it. They will die for it.

In fact, Americans have been excited during much of our national history (and even before there was anything like an American nation) by an actually- or quasi-religious passion—to know Jesus, to build a city on the hill, or, in Tom Paine’s best Deist rendition, to start the world over again—if, that is, we are the people of Great Awakenings, one after another (with intervals), so that over and over Americans are consumed by a rapture of conviction that we are God’s special children, or the masters of the universe. Then why is the belief that we deserve to be so, or that we are already so, and that even the meanest of us burns and deserves to kick the asses of pointy-headed bureaucrats and nattering nabobs of negativism, not “fundamental”?

If millions of people are galvanized into politics by a quivering passion to save “the babies,” that is, fetuses, why is their passion not fundamental?

When millions of all colors marched for civil rights, were their passions not “fundamental”? Did they have no “interest” in racial equality?

You and I share a passion for social equality. If we had our druthers, our taxes would surely go up in the interest of that equality. Not as much as a CEO’s, I daresay, but some. I would still insist that our politics are fundamental to our beings—more fundamental, in fact, than our bank balances—and I doubt this is because you and I are victims of a species of false consciousness promoted by diabolical new-class levelers. Are our interests in equality not “fundamental” or “interests”?

On the question of whether the derangement of the movement conservatives is significantly the fault of liberals for having abandoned populism, I’m not so sure. I have a soft spot for populism but it has downsides, too, don’t you think? When it worked in Kansas, it didn’t work for William Jennings Bryan nationally. I’m not sure that the mysteries of politics can be solved in a single-factor stroke. In 2002, for example, if I recall accurately, populist Democrats and centrist Democrats got clobbered about equally. In their drives toward the Democratic presidential nominations, Fred Harris, Tom Harkin (for whom, I confess, I voted in the 1992 California primary), and Jerry Brown in his populist incarnation all went nowhere. Neither did John Edwards. On the other hand, John Kerry could surely have used a more convincing story of America’s economic travail and what to do about it. So point to you there.

In some states, the right populist might trump the wrong neoliberal. In some others, the right neoliberal might trump the wrong populist. In 1992, Bill Clinton was both. In Kansas or elsewhere, I wouldn’t want to see the next great Democratic politician shot down for failing the populist test any more than I’d like to see the next insufficient Democrat lionized because he or she punches the populist ticket to kingdom come.

Best,

Todd Gitlin

----------------------------------------------

Marxisms Vulgar and Otherwise

By Thomas Frank - July 26, 2005, 10:09AM

I believe Todd Gitlin when he says he means to compliment me with his remarks about “vulgar Marxism.” Still, it is a compliment I will have to decline. Here is why:

The primary field identifier of Marxists, I have noticed over the years, is that they quote Marx or some prominent Marxian as an authority; they look to these figures for theoretical guidance. I do not. In fact, I can’t be a Marxist because I haven’t read the man, except for a few of the shorter works. Generally speaking, my guiding lights are Richard Hofstadter—a leader of the “consensus” school of American historiography—and Christopher Lasch, a man of the left who was about as far from vulgar Marxism as it’s possible to be.

Secondly, an essential feature of Marxist thought, of course, is a belief in historical determinism, in the machine-like functioning of the dialectic of history. As a believer in free will, this is something I abhor—indeed, the only people around these days who employ such a monstrous contrivance are the free-traders and New Economy gurus who argue that laissez-faire capitalism, driven by the inexorable workings of Moore’s Law (or some other crackpot libertarian historicism—there were dozens of them being tossed around in the Nineties), will inevitably conquer the planet and crush all opposition and drive the Dow to 36,000. I am proud to say that my reputation for opposing such mechanistic nonsense (for example, see the final chapter of my 2000 book, “One Market Under God”) is solid enough that one prominent libertarian actually includes me in a book bearing the Trotskoid title, “The Future and Its Enemies.” That’s right: I am a bona-fide enemy of the future. Congratulate me.

Lastly, I have no time for the famous “vulgar Marxist” conception of culture in which the relationship between the two is simple and, again, mechanical: The overclass makes culture to flatter itself and keep the workers down; every cultural product encodes the relations of production. In my view this theory is so laughable that it doesn’t merit consideration: Obviously the relationship between culture and economy is extremely complicated, with all sorts of false steps and ironies and small victories for the good guys and a million acts of genius that cannot be predicted or categorized by any “scientific” scheme. Indeed, if I really believed in such a mechanical view of culture, I wouldn’t spend my life studying it. It wouldn’t be interesting.

There are countless other reasons why I don’t identify with this way of thinking, ranging from my personal disgust with left-wing sectarianism to the horror that all reasonable people felt towards the Soviet Union.

But this should be obvious. To talk about economics isn’t Marxist. Alan Greenspan does it all the time; so does the WSJ editorial page. To talk about the relationship between economics and culture isn’t Marxist, either: They do it in every issue of Advertising Age. To think that economics are more “fundamental” than culture is also not Marxist; it’s common sense. It’s the shared assumption of every banker and Chicago-school economist in America, along with every person who’s ever had trouble paying rent or doctor’s bills or tuition or buying food.

Perhaps most importantly, it is not Marxist to criticize the political order we live under from the perspective of working people. This is deep in the American grain; it goes all the way back to the founding; it was once the province of the Democratic Party as well as the labor movement and countless home-grown radical movements (such as the early SDS), none of them doctrinaire or Marxist. If we rule all this out as the territory of vulgar Marxism, not only are we doing violence to figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Bob La Follette, but we are damaging our own movement in the here and now, putting a huge range of the human experience—work, money, the economy—off limits to ourselves.

(Another thing that’s not Marxist is to have a “false consciousness” theory for why people aren’t flocking to your movement when obviously you believe your movement is best for them. Every social movement that I have ever heard of has developed such a theory, including the laissez-faire conservatives. Hell, Bob Dole invented one to explain why he wasn’t winning in 1996. Indeed, the only time the phrase “false consciousness” comes up in my book is when it’s used by a Johnson County conservative to describe Republican moderates.)

The problem these days isn’t that we’re beset with critics who believe that culture is unimportant or insignificant or a simple extrusion of economic reality. On the contrary: We live in a world where culture is everything, where everyone knows about movie stars and hip hop and advertising schemes and offensive art—and it is the making of things that has been eclipsed, forgotten, deleted. This is one of the reasons that culture wars have supplanted the old class politics of another age. I can attest to this in a personal way, since I used to be one of those people who wrote about culture absolutely apart from economics; I fought and fought with my friends over the merits of this or that rock band; I raged against fundies and believed that pissing off Jimmy Swaggart or someone was the noblest goal to which one could aspire. Then, one day, I was assigned to write about a strike in central Illinois, and suddenly I remembered that there was this wide world of production out there, and that people like me knew absolutely nothing about it. This was a secret world, hugely important and yet utterly unfamiliar.

Okay. I’ve now spent an hour discussing a single point that probably nobody gives a damn about. Todd makes dozens of other points that are equally important—our shared fondness for Mencken, for example—but those will have to wait for another day.

Posted at April 13, 2008 4:45 PM in response to Maul Game

I am doubleplus OUTRAGED at your NAIVE (or is it calculated?) SUGGESTION that it might be legitimate to think that such a thing as OUTRAGE FATIGUE might ever set in. Obviously you are stooging for George W. Bush.

Posted at March 24, 2008 5:42 PM in response to Quiet Monday Open Thread

I largely agree but for your statement that "the vast majority of people have formed a view of Rev Wright based on a handful of short, grainy youtube clips." I'm told that a recent poll finds 42% of Americans unaware of the Rev. Wright--unaware, period. These folks might prove vulnerable to endless replays of the videos; or might get sick and tired of the people who keep playing them; or both. We don't know. We won't know.

Posted at March 20, 2008 8:33 AM in response to "Let People Draw Their Own Conclusions"