Clinton’s Racial Provokatsiia.

“We seem to be at the point where there are now two credible possibilities. One is that the Clinton campaign is intentionally pursuing a strategy of using surrogates to hit Obama with racially-charged language or with charges that while not directly tied to race nonetheless play to stereotypes about black men. The other possibility is that the Clinton campaign is extraordinarily unlucky and continually finds its surrogates stumbling on to racially-charged or denigrating language when discussing Obama.” TPM‘s Josh Marshall ponders the last week in politics, while going on to defend Clinton’s “fairy tale” remark as untinged by race. (I would agree — I found it dismaying for other reasons, which I’ve explained twice, and which The Nation‘s David Corn also finds reprehensible — the Rovian swift-boating of Senator Obama’s stance on the Iraq war.)

Another commenter at TPM aptly characterized what the Clintons have been doing here (the “rope-a-dope” strategy I outlined in the comments the other day.): “I think that the Clintons’ anti-Obama strategy is more subtle than commentators are realizing. It is in the nature of a ‘provokatsiia’, as the Russians say…Such comments are a provocation, waving a red cloak in front of the Obama people. When they respond angrily with charges of racism, suddenly they look like Jesse Jackson redux…just the kind of angry, militant black folks who scare white people…The whole point was to get the Obama people to respond angrily, which they did. Clintons win.” And we all get dirty.

Update: “Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?” The Post‘s Eugene Robinson sees a similar strategy at work.

Update 2: As does Margaret Carlson: “While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern.”

Update 3: As does the New York Times: “By the time the campaigns got to New Hampshire, the Clinton team was panicking…It was clearly her side that first stoked the race and gender issue.“

Greenberg: Missing the Thread.

In the Washington Post, Rutgers historian David Greenberg calls Barack Obama the “great white hope”, and argues that his broad-based appeal amounts to little more than “a fantasy of easy redemption…Inspiring and exhilarating as it is, Obamamania allows us to sidestep the hardest challenges, at least for now.” Now, Greenberg is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve disagreed in the past. Still, with all due respect, this is about as wrong as I’ve ever seen him, and, by putting so much argumentative emphasis on race, this article veers dangerously close to being the historian’s version of the “imaginary hip black friend” argument of earlier in the week. My quick response, originally posted over at Cliopatria, is below.

The problem for me with Greenberg’s piece is that he too readily dismisses the ideological appeal of Obama’s candidacy in one sentence. “On the contrary, Obama’s ideology, insofar as he has articulated it, seems to be a familiar, mainstream liberalism, heavy on communitarianism. High-minded and process-oriented, in the Mugwump tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Bill Bradley, it is pitched less to the Democratic Party’s working-class base than to upscale professionals.“

I consider Greenberg a friend and an excellent historian, but as I’ve written before, I disagree with him fundamentally on this point. Obama’s language of civic-minded progressivism cannot be dismissed so readily. It’s a huge part of his appeal, bigger — to my mind — than the simple fact of his race. And by sloughing off Obama’s ideological appeal so quickly, Greenberg is then forced to overstate significantly the racial nature of Obama’s candidacy, and make extremely dubious claims about we Obama supporters looking for “easy redemption.”

Also, I’m by no means a reflexive Clinton-hater, although I do feel the past week in American politics has tarnished their legacy considerably. Still, I would not concur with Greenberg that Clinton managed to “formulate a viable and vital new liberalism.” The restoration of fiscal sanity in 1993 notwithstanding, by the middle of his first term, Clinton liberalism was in full rout, and it pretty much has been ever since. The remaining six Clinton years were spent mainly just triangulating madly to stay afloat.

Putting race aside — if we can still manage to do that after the past few days — Obama’s rhetoric calls for a repairing of the civic fabric and a progressive-minded style of governance that dreams big. And that — not easy fantasies of racial reconciliation — is what people are responding to. Without vision, the people perish…and, frankly, school uniforms and V-chips just aren’t going to cut it anymore.

Update: See also TNR’s Noam Scheiber.

The Victim Card…Again.

“I regret the way that this matter has been used,’ Clinton told reporters. ‘The comments about it are baseless and divisive. I was personally offended at the approach taken that was not only misleading but unnecessarily hurtful.’” When asked about Congressman Jim Clyburn’s dissatisfaction with her recent remarks on the civil rights movement, Sen. Hillary Clinton suggests she‘s the aggrieved party here, and, worse, that a vast Obama conspiracy is to blame for people — including Clyburn — finding fault with her remarks. “She suggested reporters consider the sources of the criticism, much of which has come from the black community. ‘I think it clearly came from Senator Obama’s campaign and I don’t think it’s the kind of debate we should be having in our campaign,’ she said.” Wow. I mean, I’m running out of ways to be surprised here. Isn’t this the exact same cynical and misleading strategy that President Clinton just accused Senator Obama of running? This is just getting depressing.

Update: On Meet the Press, Sen. Hillary Clinton continues the “Vast Obama Conspiracy” defense. “‘This is, you know, a, a — an unfortunate story line that the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully,’ she said. ‘They’ve been putting out talking points. They’ve been making this — they’ve been telling people, in a very selective way, what the facts are.” Uh, swift-boat much? What evidence do you have that the Obama team is responsible for people finding your recent actions dismaying? And why not just say your words could be misconstrued, apologize, and move on? Instead, we get: “Clearly, we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this.” What media reports? (The closest I could find was this, when an Obama spokesman suggested there might be a “pattern” here. Well, given Billy Shaheen, mandatory minimums, “imaginary hip black friend,” and such readily misconstruable remarks as “fairy tale” and “kid,” and the LBJ “It takes a president” history lesson, I can see why one might think so. But I see little other evidence that the Obama campaign is responsible for the general dismay surrounding the Clintons right now. These people have no sense of shame.

Update 2: Obama’s response: “‘The notion that this is our doing is ludicrous.” Meanwhile, the Clinton people point to this memo, drawn up by Amaya Smith, Obama’s press secretary in SC but not released to the press. Sigh…this may well be the dumb mistake the Clintons have been baiting the Obama team to make. Still, having read through the memo, I’m not seeing any “deliberate distortions” of the Clintons’ behavior, so much as a litany of the unfortunate incidents that have been emanating from the Clinton camp. (I hadn’t heard the Trippi v. Penn “cocaine” one. Cute.) Plus, the memo seems to follow the concerned responses of leaders such as Jim Clyburn and Donna Brazile — in fact, that’s the newspeg. Hard to say that it created them.

Update 3: Hillary Clinton is defended by BET’s Robert Johnson, who also sees fit to bring up the drug spectre again. “‘As an African American, I’m frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing but he said it in his book’…Clinton’s campaign says Johnson was not referring to Obama’s past drug use. Meanwhile, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, another African-American supporter of Clinton, said of the comments, ‘Sometimes people say things that aren’t sanctioned…I can’t speak for Bob.’“

Update 4: Johnson — previously a stalwart foe of the estate tax, by the way — also went on to compare Obama to Sidney Poitier, and not in a good way. Yep, a classy day all around for Team Clinton. I have to think this’ll backfire.

Update 5: Johnson’s official response to his earlier comment: “Johnson said it would be ‘simply irresponsible and incorrect’ to read his words that way. ‘My comments today were referring to Barack Obama’s time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else.’” Now, read back into the original quote, that clearly doesn’t make a lick of sense. But who’s got his back? Why, Bill Clinton: “I think we have to take him at his word.” It’s not a lie if you believe it, right, Mr. President?

Mr. President, there’s a “Mr. Kettle” on the phone…

“‘This is what happens any time anyone tries to question a statement or a position of Senator Obama,’ Clinton says in an interview now airing on Sirius satellite radio. “The response is, ‘You’re attacking me personally,’ and that relieves him of the obligation to address the substance.” Bill Clinton spins himself deeper. When has Sen. Obama said anything of the sort? The closest I could find was this, from Dec. 21, after several weeks of Sen. Clinton’s “Now comes the fun part” attack strategy: “‘So far, I think, attempts to go negative in a way that’s not policy-based have backfired on the people who have gone in that direction,’ Obama said during a brief interview…’I would distinguish between ads that I would say maybe mischaracterize my positions but had to do with policy, versus personal attacks or attempts to go at my character or those things. In which case, I will answer them swiftly and truthfully if they’re false and trust in the voters.’” So Obama hasn’t said anything of the kind. Clinton instead appears to be projecting his own tried-and-tested strategy upon the Senator from Illinois.

President Clinton’s clarifying of his sad “fairy tale” moment is as follows: “Clinton told Sharpton the ‘fairy tale’ remark was only intended to describe Obama’s claim to have exercised better judgment about the war, and was not intended as a sign of ‘personal disrespect.’” Clinton has then continued to press this “flip-flopper on Iraq” attack: “And in fifteen debates, no one ever once bothered to ask Senator Obama, ‘How can you say you were always against the war, and your judgment is better than theirs, and they were wrong to vote for that resolution which authorized force, when two years after you gave the anti-war speech in 2004, you, Senator Obama said you didn’t know how you would have voted on that anti-war resolution, number one, then two days later, you said there was no difference between you and President Bush on the war?’”

For what it’s worth, Tim Grieve posted on this on “fairy tale” day, as did I, and an exhausted-seeming Obama responded to ABC then too. (Note, in Obama’s response to Clinton, that he says nothing akin to what Clinton is claiming about personal attacks.) So I’m repeating myself now, but then again so are the Clintons.

As Americans can remember all too well, former President Clinton has a practiced affinity for the lawyerly half-truth. (“That depends on what your definition of the word “is” is,” ad absurdum.) With regard to this continued smear, the key word is “debates.” This exact question may not have come up during a Democratic debate, sure. But it was one of the centerpieces of Obama’s appearance on Meet the Press on November 11 — see page 2 of the transcript — and it’s been asked and answered. (See also this incomplete clip of CNN’s Candy Crowley covering the same ground with Obama.) Worse, Clinton keeps leaving out the parts of Obama’s quotes that prove his charges are baseless. I’ve reposted Grieve’s summation below:

“Yes, Obama said in 2004 [at the Democratic convention, as we were nominating two war-voting Senators] that he did not know how he would have voted on the war if he’d been in the Senate at the time. But he suggested in the same interview that his uncertainty stemmed from the fact that he wasn’t ‘privy to the Senate intelligence reports” that sitting senators saw,’ and he added: ‘What I know is that, from my vantage point, the case was not made.‘” [My emphasis.]

“Did Obama really say in 2004 that there was ‘no difference’ between his views and George W. Bush’s on the war? Not exactly. As the Washington Post has explained previously, what Obama actually said in the interview to which Clinton was referring was that while he would have voted against the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, he was not in favor of ‘pulling out now.’ Thus, when Obama said that there’s ‘not much of a difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage,’ he was plainly referring to the question of whether to stay in Iraq, not the decision to invade in the first place.“

Clinton kept repeating this “fairy-tale” accusation in his string of so-called apologies today, but he has yet to give the full story about Obama’s remarks. He’s contrived a negative attack out of a deceptive half-truth, and he’s clearly just trying to confuse people. When it comes to the substance of Clinton’s smear, there’s no there there.

In short, President Clinton is obfuscating here about Senator Obama’s view of the war. Use a stronger word if you’d like.

Update: “‘I’m really troubled by his questioning the sincerity of Barack Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq,’ Durbin said. ‘I really think it is unfortunate to question Barack’s sincerity on the war. He has been there from the start, opposing this war.’” Obama supporter Sen. Richard Durbin responds — and responds hard. I love this: “If President Clinton had opposed that war as strongly as Barack Obama at the time, it would have helped a lot of us who had voted against authorizing an invasion.” Touche.

Permission to Come Aboard.

“Since the birth of our nation change has been won by young presidents and young leaders who have shown that experience is not defined by time in Washington and years in office. It is defined by wisdom and instinct and vision…The only charge that rings false is the one that tells you not to hope for a better America. Don’t let anyone tell you to accept the downsizing of the American dream.” Barack Obama picks up a few more endorsements in Sen. John Kerry (and more importantly, his voter list and organization), South Dakota Senators Tim Johnson and Tom Daschle, and Congressman George Miller (which some see as a nod from Speaker Pelosi, although Pelosi clarified again today that she plans not to endorse anyone.) In the meantime, while a new poll has Obama up 12 in South Carolina (not that polls mean much anymore, of course), South Carolina’s leading Democrat (and my old congressman) Jim Clyburn still hasn’t officially picked his candidate. “Clyburn, continuing to be coy about his endorsement, often tells reporters that he’s made up his mind, but never offers a name. Most signs, though, point to Obama.”

Update: “To call that dream [of an Obama presidency] a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us.” No official word yet, but Clyburn suggests again he’s leaning Obama now, in part because of the Clintons’ dismaying behavior in New Hampshire. Speaking of Senator Clinton’s enthronement of LBJ as the civil rights ideal: “‘We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,’ said Mr. Clyburn, who was shaped by his searing experiences as a youth in the segregated South and his own activism in those days. ‘It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.‘”

Update 2: I posted more about Clyburn’s remarks — and Clinton’s view of history — here.

Clintons, Fatigued.

Well, suffice to say, the past 24 hours have not been the Clintons’ finest hour. At this point, you’ve probably seen Hillary’s lip-quivering moment yesterday. I was going just to leave it well enough alone — partly because things seem to be breaking Obama’s way at the moment, so why pile on, and partly because I’d prefer to write the post-mortems post-mortem (I mean, let’s not count our chickens in NH just yet, although turnout looks historic.) But then I witnessed the wholly depressing sight of an exhausted Bill Clinton completely going off the rails this morning. If you missed it, he ranted about the press coverage and called Obama’s surge “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” I found this exasperating, and so, some quick thoughts.

There’s been much back and forth about the genuineness of Hillary’s Muskie moment, whether it was a contrived campaign stunt to humanize her or a brief twinge of Clinton’s very real frustration leaking through. (If forced to draw a conclusion, and at the risk of being called an orc, I’d say it was a bit of both. Some Clinton supporters argue that she got emotional solely because she was just that moved by the problems facing America…Strange, then, that this sort of thing didn’t happen until after Iowa.) At any rate, the fact that we even have to wonder whether or not her emotion was authentic suggests the problem her candidacy faces from now herein: The Senator is not a new face. For better or for worse, the nation has formed a definite view of Hillary Clinton over the past two decades, and it’s hard to imagine that impression changing in the few weeks between now and February 5. If Clinton loses tonight in New Hampshire, the only possible way she can get back into the race in so short a time – barring a monumental Obama flub — is by going scorched-earth negative, which will redound badly for her, for Obama, and for all Democrats this cycle. She’ll either still lose, and have lost ugly, or she’ll have won a Pyrrhic victory that’s turned off crucial swing voters. I mean, the GOP candidates are lousy, but they’re not that lousy.

Which brings us to President Clinton. Of course he’ll be supporting his wife’s candidacy ’til the heavens fall, and of course he believes his wife is the best, most qualified candidate. That’s fine, no problems there. Still, I’d kinda hoped that America’s “first black president” might avoid taking serious potshots himself at the man who could very well be America’s first black president, if only because their appeal as “change” candidates in 1992 and 2008 bear some similarities. Alas, this morning’s remarks put an end to that “false hope.” (I’d do a point-for-point rebuttal of President Clinton’s unbecoming lunges, but Salon‘s Tim Grieve already pushed back against the “free ride from the press” line and has pointed out the half-quotes and spin propelling the rest of his arguments, and Senator Obama, also looking dog-tired, responded well to Clinton’s scattershot attack here.) Obviously, fatigue is a huge factor right now, and both Clintons must be feeling anger, frustration, and even a certain amount of denial about how nightmarishly things are shaking out for them. But, that doesn’t excuse the flailing for negativity here.

Of course, whatever happens tonight, the Clintons continuing negative seems a pretty good bet. And their central line of attack thus far seems to be that America doesn’t know what Obama stands for — he’s just a vague bromide-spouting Hope machine. Well, forgive the flippancy here — I’m having my own New Hampshire fatigue moment, and I find this argument tremendously irritating — but some scientists got together a few years back and created this thing called the “Internet.” (Or Internets, if you prefer — You may have heard about it. Al Gore was involved.) Anyway, on this Internet, there are things called websites, and on Barack Obama’s website, he has pages devoted to issues, where you can look up what he thinks and plans to do — from Day One, even — about education, the economy, health care, homeland security, you name it. So, if you feel like Obama is some unknowable cipher just because he usually chooses not to speak in the soul-deadening rhetoric of statistics and position papers, check it out. It’s really quite useful, this information superhighway thing…I wonder if it’s possible to make any money off it.

Progressivism, Continued.

So, sorry to regale y’all with another long-winded, bloviating political post only two entries after the last one. But Ted of The Late Adopter asked an important follow-up to my comments on David Greenberg’s Obama piece and public-interest progressivism, namely: “If FDR, Stevenson, the Kennedys all spoke with the rhetoric of citizenship, when did the Democrats stop? With Johnson? Carter? During the 80s while trying to oppose Reagan?” And, while trying to respond in the comment section, I apparently blathered on so long that I broke the site. (“Access Denied with Code 406….severity [EMERGENCY]“) So, I’m posting my response as an entry instead (and there’s precedent for this anyway, as when Scully and I discussed the space program a few years ago.) So, if you find this all ponderous and insufferable, feel free to skip down to the previous entry, where I raved on at equal length about Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (10/10!) And I promise to get back to more concise entries again soon…

“Hmm, good question, Ted. Let me take a crack at it in the long-winded, digression-filled, multiple-answer manner we’ve been trained into. 🙂

First, while I don’t think he’s entirely comfortable with the Sandelian argument I’m making here, our mutual advisor posits one answer to this question in The End of Reform: This all began in earnest during WWII, when two things occurred. [1] The financial and productive power of Big Business became absolutely integral to the success of the war effort (thus there was less of a rationale for opposing corporate power in political life), and [2] Politicians and economists discovered in boom times and Keynesianiam that they could “grow the pie,” economically speaking, rather than be forced to choose a best way to carve it up. So, the civic-minded questions of political economy that dominated the early New Deal fell by the wayside.

Obviously, Adlai and the brothers Kennedy come after WWII, so that in itself is not a complete answer. So I’d add the following trends:

* 1968. Like 1919-1920, when the strike wave, the race riots, the Red Scare, the failure at Versailles, and various other traumatic events — the tail-end of the influenza wave, the death of TR, the Black Sox scandal, the widespread exposure to Freudianism, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and literary/artistic modernism, the recent Bolshevik revolution, and the Great War itself — all conspired to create great anxiety and help overturn the existing order, I would argue that the events of 1968 irrevocably rent the social fabric of the nation.

It became especially hard for anyone after ’68 to talk about a civic project or a common public interest when America was divided so badly between left and right, black and white — rifts that Republicans like Nixon and Reagan would exploit to their advantage with the Southern strategy and veiled rhetoric about “law and order” — particularly when those leaders who did it best were gunned down in their prime. (This “culture war” is one of the same obstacles the progressives face in the ’20s, with the Red Scare, Scopes, Prohibition, the KKK, etc.) It also became problematic to speak in the language of citizenship when it was now well beyond clear that [a] women, African-Americans, and other minorities had been and were being treated in the civic culture as second-class citizens, and [b] the main civic project which the government was then asking its citizens to become engaged in was the war in Vietnam, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

* GENERATIONS. While both the early New Left (see the Port Huron Statement) and the early civil rights movement (see King, in the original entry) have strong civic, and even Emersonian, components, both Sixties protest groups and the general mood of politics eventually swung over into the rhetoric of individualistic, rights-based liberalism. Meanwhile, the New Right, in its opposition to the New Deal and Great Society, also abandoned to a large extent the language of citizenship and virtue and made an appeal based on individual freedom as opposed to a corrupt, socialistic central government. (For an excellent civic-conservative reaction to this shift, see George Will’s 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft, the best thing he’s ever written.)

Stevenson and the Kennedys were of the WWII generation, and — while I loathe the term “greatest generation,” unless you find something inherently great about training fire hoses on small children — they were more comfortable with the civic, “we’re all in it together” appeal of an earlier time. The appeal held less water with the much more skeptical Boomer generation, and, as the political culture embraced the individualistic liberalism/liberation of the late sixties and early seventies, with the nation at large. (You could argue Carter tried to make a civic argument on the energy question, and he was basically laughed out of the room.) Boomer politicians of either party — the Clintons, the Bushes — just aren’t as comfortable making civic-minded, public-interest arguments as their forbears. It’s not how they see the game is played. This is also due to:

* WATERGATE, GATEGATE. From Vietnam to (particularly) Watergate to bureaucratic bloat to Iran-Contra to the fiascos of today, Americans have experienced a severe diminuition in what we believe government is and should be capable of. This open-eyed skepticism about centralized power should be a good thing, but not if we throw out the baby with the bathwater. You know how Richard said “a withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy?” Irony isn’t only the shackles of youth, it’s the shackles of our politics as well.

There’s other things going on too. Not to get all Caro up in here, but LBJ, I think, was inherently uncomfortable making civic arguments as well (unless he was appropriating them, a la “We shall overcome.”) His view, shaped as it was by the exigencies of local Texas politics and his days running the Senate, was that everything ultimately boiled down to self-interest. (This partly explains how he could screw up Vietnam so badly. Eventually he thinks about buying off Ho Chi Minh with a TVA-style system of dams for the Mekong Delta, not realizing that Ho — and North Vietnam — are persevering in part because they’ve committed to an ideal more important to them then self-interest: national independence, a cause they felt they’d been fighting for for thousands of years.)

But, perhaps most important to note, I think it’s fair to say that one reason the rhetoric of citizenship went out of style was because:

* THE PATTERN WAS FLAWED, for all the reasons I said above. If I was a guy growing up in Chicago, Mississippi, or anywhere else, and I was being treated as a second-class citizen by the white power structure, either by being denied the right to vote or being snubbed out of quality jobs or housing, and then I was told my civic duty was to go die in Southeast Asia for lousy reasons (while the Dick Cheneys of the world piled up deferments), I might turn against the civic project too. If I was a woman who was told my civic duty basically amounted to finding a good man, keeping his stomach full and his house clean, and punching out healthy, patriotic American children, I’d rebel against this flawed social order as well.

In short, the post-WWII, Cold War-obsessed civic culture of the 1950s and early 1960s was stifling and half-baked. It basically told citizens that their civic obligation was to buy as much as possible, to not consort with Reds, and, most importantly, to not cause any trouble. It needed to be broken up and reconfigured.

(The progressives of the 1920s come to this conclusion as well, when they see how easily Wilsonian public-interest rhetoric enables the Red Scare (thus letting people on the Right brand every possible progressive program as “Bolshevik.”) This is why some of the most civic-minded Progressives — Jane Addams, for example — play a major part in the creation of the ACLU.)

Here we get to the inherent problems with arguments that rely on civic-mindedness and appeals to citizenship. For one, a public interest that treats certain citizens as second-class is inherently and fatally flawed. Look at the early New Left — for all its progressive inclinations and civic-mindedness on paper and even in practice, it still basically treated women like the help. (See SNCC and Stokely Carmichael: “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.“)

Plus, as a general rule of human nature, groups of people working together tend to desire conformity and despise independence, no matter what their political inclinations. This is as much a failing of the Left as it is the Right. (See Animal Farm, Dylan plugging in at Newport, etc.)

Also, here the coercion problem in civic strands of political thought rears its head — Rousseau’s social compact forcing people to be free, and all that. An argument made on the basis of citizenship presumes coercion — citizens are expected to do this (vote, serve in the military, be informed about public matters) and not do that (drink, hang with Communists, etc.) Coercion isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself — I think everyone agrees citizens should not kill, own slaves, etc. — but [1] telling people they have to do anything goes against the view of absolute individual freedom enthroned today, and [2] coercion invariably leads to conformity. which is ultimately the avowed enemy of republican government, which both relies on and should promote individual excellence.

How do we get around this Gordian knot? My answer (which, not surprisingly, was also the answer of many of the Progressives) rests with Emerson. As I just said, an argument based on citizenship presupposes inculcating a certain virtue into citizens. But what if that virtue was individuality (not the same as individualism) and independence? The ability to think for oneself, the freedom to grow and innovate, and then the inclination to come back to the circle of citizens, share what you’ve learned, and deliberate about the public good? Emerson argues that we express our consent to government by expressing our dissent with government. If republican government is going to reach its full potential, it needs a community of independent-minded nonconformists. This is the type of citizenship a progressive candidate could and should get behind.

And the Progressives did promote it — People always read Herbert Croly as an apologist for strong, centralized government, but this isn’t quite right. Decades before he got into poltics, Croly was an architecture critic — he was deeply concerned about art and aesthetics, and was trying to fashion a political architecture that would help individuals to thrive. At the end of The Promise of American Life (p. 414), Croly talks about what’s he’s been aspiring to create: “A national structure which encourages individuality as opposed to mere particularity is one which creates innumerable special niches, adapted to all degrees and kinds of individual development.” For him the “Jeffersonian ends” of individuality and improvement were as important as the “Hamiltonian means” of a strong central government.

Ok, to step away from Planet Theory and get back to our real world: How would progressive-minded candidates of today work towards this new civic fabric? Well, first and most importantly, they would have to reconceive today’s liberal arguments in civic, progressive terms, to stop using the language of consumer choice and individual freedom — which plays so easily into the hands of corporate power and the small-government Right — like a crutch and bring back the language of citizenship and a shared narrative/vision/history that brings people together. The civic idea is so desiccated at the moment, for all the reasons mentioned in the original post, that just hearkening to its continued existence would be an immense step in the right direction (as well as a huge political boon for the Left regardless.)

From there, progressives, like their counterparts a century ago, would have to work to fix a broken system. This means campaign finance and lobbying reform, doing what we can to ensure that unwashed money doesn’t corrupt the system as horribly as it does now, and that dollars don’t speak louder than people.

As important here is voting reform. The voting system in our nation is absolutely abysmal. I refuse to believe that a country that can give almost every supermarket or store an ATM and almost every person a cellphone and iPod must be reduced to semi-functioning punchcard booths or electronic voting that can’t create a paper trail. And the long lines we see on every election day are patently shameful. Election Day should be a holiday (why not?), we should move to weekend voting, we should establish a Marshall plan to get every county in America an operating voting system, or something. Also, I doubt mandatory voting would ever work in this country, but what about tax incentives, or more likely public-private partnerships to encourage turnout? (Thanks for voting — here’s your free sundae at McDonalds and 20% off your next purchase at Borders.) The people who say this would be tantamount to bribing folks to vote are usually the people who don’t want voters showing up at the polls.

Today’s progressives should also look to education. The (Bill) Clinton model of adult, lifelong education is a step in the right direction, but what’s missing is the civic component. Civics is deader than dead in our high schools and colleges, so on the most basic level that needs to be emphasized. But, equally importantly, we need to reemphasize the skills key to republican government: critical thinking, deliberation, etc. (Dare I say it, reading.) From an early age we all need to learn how to sift through information to reach a critically informed opinion, to ask the right questions about the information being presented to us, and — perhaps most importantly — to learn how to engage with people who disagree with us in a constructive fashion.

And, a civic-minded progressive would continually look to our shared past and our shared future to bring Americans together. This would mean not only basking in but owning up to our collective past — say, adding a National Museum of Slavery to the Mall. It would also mean engaging in great civic projects which would bind the nation in common purpose (one of the many reasons I believe in the necessity of the space program.)

Some might argue that I’m on crack for thinking that campaign finance reform, civics classes, a slavery museum, and/or a trillion-dollar space program is going to change what’s wrong with America. And, no, these aren’t sufficient. But, as I said in the original post, the story is everything. If our leaders help us reconceive our view of the government — to remind us that the government is an expression of our shared values and ambitions as citizens — then we can begin to look at other problems differently. If we’re all in it together, the continued existence of child poverty, or the woeful lack of health insurance for many, here in the richest nation on Earth becomes that much more unacceptable.

I’m not naive enough to believe that embracing civic progressivism or adopting the rhetoric of citizenship is going to change the country immediately, that money is suddenly going to disappear from our political process thanks to one new law, or that the next iteration of American’s civic fabric will be bereft of the types of discrimination in evidence in the 1860s, 1920s, 1960s and beyond. But, to borrow from Cornel West, “To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.“

To put the same argument another way, there’s a scene in The Princess Bride where our hero Westley (Cary Elwes) and the princess Buttercup (Robin Wright Penn) are on the run and looking for safety in the dastardly and invariably fatal Fire Swamp. “We’ll never survive,” bemoans Buttercup, to which Westley responds: “You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” That pretty much sums up how I feel about a lot of things, including progressivism in politics. Does true love exist? I dunno. Lord knows it hasn’t seemed like it, and I’ve been kicked in the teeth often enough at this point to think not. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t live my life as if it could happen. Same with this view of civic progressivism. David Greenberg may be right that civic-minded candidates have done pretty poorly in recent history, but that doesn’t mean the principle is flawed, or that we should stop trying.

And, besides, to jump over to another fantasy classic, you don’t wear the ring — you destroy the ring. So I’d rather stake my claim with the public interest progressives, even if that doesn’t play as well as all the blatant appeals to self-interest, than get all Boromir up in here and start acting like Republican-lite, which all too many of our party frontrunners have been doing these past few years.

Progressivism: A Born Loser?

Reagan aside, I do respectfully take issue with Greenberg’s prior Slate piece comparing Obama to a long list of well-meaning losers, including Adlai Stevenson and Bill Bradley. Greenberg writes: “Obama exhibits other elements of this Stevensonian style as well. It’s a style — an ideology, really — that links the quest for common ground with a language of enlightened reason. It disdains the passionate and sometimes ugly politics of backroom deals, negative campaigning, sordid tactics, and appeals to emotion. It extols sacrifice and denigrates self-interest…What he doesn’t seem to understand — as Stevenson did not — is that democratic politics fairly demands a measure of thrust and parry, of appeals to self-interest, and of playing the political game. And so does being a good president.“

I would argue that these constant appeals to individual self-interest is exactly what’s what wrong with Democrats today. Put simply, our civic life has nearly wasted away, with devastating consequences for the Left in this country.The major operative question our politics seeks to answer today is not “How should we live?” or “What can we accomplish together?” but “Where’s my stuff?” And, due to this narrow, limiting absorption with individual self-interest, lefty candidates of late have mostly based their proactive appeals on small-minded ideas like bribing elderly voters with prescription drug benefits and everyone else with tax cuts. That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?

As a result, more and more citizens are tuning out of the process completely. Without vision, the people perish. People find the grasping individualism at the center of politics today inherently unsatisfying, and they look for a deeper common purpose wherever they can find it. And, since Democrats too often can’t stop speaking in uninspiring technocratic policy-wonk, a consequence of their limited vision and ambitions, voters have been inclining in recent years toward the GOP, who at least offer a flawed but workable story, often rooted in gung-ho nationalism and unpacked ideas like “Freedom, Yeah!”, about who we are as a people. The story is everything (which is one main reason why I was drawn to American history in the first place.) To be successful, to be anything other than GOP-lite — a pathetic state we’ve been floundering in for decades — Democrats need to tell the nation a story about our shared history and our shared goals, and stop pandering to voters’ immediate self-interest all the live-long day.

Greenberg may argue that civic-mindedness in a political candidate is the province of losers, but I disagree — It’s all in the telling. After all, it was the extremely popular John F. Kennedy who reminded us to ask what you can do for your country, and his slain brother RFK obviously talked a great game in that respect too.

In this piece, Greenberg also discusses the retreat from the “the Mugwumps’ and Progressives’ moral uplift in favor of a pragmatic approach” under FDR. (This is also the ground my dissertation covers.) And, yes, the broker-state model of governance honed by the New Deal worked for a long time. More importantly, the idea of interest-group pluralism it cultivated has had many critically important successes to its name, not the least the civil rights revolutions of the past few decades (although those too have a strong civic component — MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech makes it explicit: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.” This is not the language of self-interest but an appeal to a shared narrative as Americans.)

But I would argue that the enthronement of individual self-interest above all else in politics has reached its logical endpoint, and as a result our system is on the verge of falling apart — half the country doesn’t vote, money constantly bends the rules and everyone knows it, people are losing the inclination (or even the capacity) to act as informed, independent citizens. Indeed, you could argue Hillary Clinton’s failure with health care reform in the nineties exemplified the problem with broker-state leadership: When setting out to confront the issue, the Clintons cut everyone in on the deal, from insurance companies to HMOS to the AMA, in true broker-state fashion. As a result, no reform at all was forthcoming.

This was mainly because, as I’ve said before, the individualistic/broker state model of liberalism has no theory for coping with corporate power — It serves the wants, needs, and interests of consumers, what’s wrong with that? But a civic-minded progressive would argue that there are more important goals than the sating of individual desire, that the government is an expression of our common aspirations and should be more than just a dispensing machine, and that undue corporate influence over — and outright corruption in — our political affairs in fact represents a dire threat to the republic and to our way of life.

The progressive idea of citizenship both offers and demands higher aspirations of people than the lowest common denominator of individual self-interest that both parties appeal to today. We’re fast becoming a society where freedom is measured at best by what choices we make, but more often by what we can own as consumers. Progressives envison a society where freedom is also measured by what we can accomplish as citizens. Ultimately, freedom isn’t a state of being — it’s a state of becoming, of improvement, of progress. A political candidate who could tap into this progressive vein, I think, could inspire people like they haven’t been inspired by politics in a good long while. So, this is my crux of disagreement with Greenberg here — I don’t subscribe to the notion that common-good, public-interest progressivism is inherently a losing proposition. Quite the contrary.

Still, Greenberg’s article does a solid job of delineating the origins of Obama’s progressive appeal, and, at the very least, we agree that Obama is considerably more progressive than Clinton.

The Queen II: The Joint Inheritance.

Speaking of US-international relations, with Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and rewrites of State of Play and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy under his belt, British writer Peter Morgan now plans a sequel to The Queen “which will examine former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s relationships with U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.” Michael Sheen is set to reprise his role as the PM, although director Stephen Frears is not returning.

Mama said you’d be the chosen one.

Making the rounds today, Hillary (and Bill) Clinton — enjoying a bounce in the polls (as is Fred Thompson on the GOP side) — hamhandedly riff on The Sopranos finale (with the aid of Johnny Sack) to announce the new Clinton campaign song, (ugh) Celine Dion’s “You and I.” Celine Dion? There’s yet another good reason to support Obama or Edwards in this primary contest.