Answering Tomasky’s Defense of Presidents Against Progressive PressureBy: David Dayen Tuesday June 15, 2010 1:14 pm
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I wanted to briefly respond to Michael Tomasky’s essay in Democracy, “Against Despair,” because I think he makes a serious argument that requires a serious response. I agree with about 40% of it. There’s no question that, as a matter of the historical record, FDR and LBJ made concessions to the conservatives of their time that frustrated and angered more progressive supporters and limited the scope of their agenda. It’s also true that history tends to smooth out these fits and starts and turn leaders into archetypes more than politicians muddling through. Here’s an example:
It’s worth noting, for example, that the second act to become law under the New Deal, after the Emergency Banking Act, which was a progressive piece of legislation, was a conservative bill, the Economy Act. It cut salaries of government employees and benefits to veterans, the latter by 15 percent. Arthur Schlesinger, in The Coming of the New Deal, writes that literally an hour after signing the banking act, Roosevelt outlined this bill to congressional leaders, saying the next day and sounding more than a little like some Robert Rubin progenitor had been whispering in his ear: “For three long years, the federal government has been on the road toward bankruptcy.” (And maybe one had: Schlesinger notes that Roosevelt’s budget director, Lewis Douglas, was certainly no Keynesian.) Just imagine Obama having tried something like that, alienating both veterans and AFSCME within a week of taking office. The Economy Act was opposed by many liberals in the House, so FDR turned to conservative Democrats and Republicans, who passed it.
If Tomasky were merely arguing that progressives who have been critical of the Obama Administration should incorporate a sense of perspective and history into their criticisms, that wouldn’t be an out-of-line argument. But Tomasky goes further than that. He seems to intimate that progressive despair disrupts liberal goals and makes them nearly impossible to garner. So there’s an appeal to history to calm dissent. Here’s the money graf for this:
The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight. Indeed, the entire Obama era, if it lasts eight years, is best thought of not as a culmination, or a self-contained time frame that should be judged a failure if X, Y, and Z don’t happen. It’s the start of a process that may take 16 years, or 24; that may be along the way interrupted or undone; that will be fought tooth and nail, as we’ve plainly seen these recent months, by others whose idea of America is incomprehensible to us but who are citizens too, with the same rights we have. They (and by the way: no despair on their side! There is rage, to be sure, but judging from the Tea Party events I’ve been to and watched, it is a joyful rage) and the corporate interests and the elected representatives on their side have a lot of power. Liberal despair only reinforces their power and helps to ensure that whatever gains are made during the Obama term could quickly be rolled back. And if that happens, we are back, ten years from now, to fighting the usual rearguard battles.
If this were true, then Tomasky would have to show evidence in the historical record. After all, he notes that FDR had his liberal critics, as did LBJ in the early 1960s when the Great Society reforms took root. Did these critics reinforce the power of the forces trying to stop the New Deal or the Great Society? Is there any evidence that liberal frustration and progressive pressure had a negative effect on their overall plan? Actually, the history Tomasky provides suggests the exact opposite of that. Over time the reforms put forward by FDR and LBJ only grew stronger – this is often the appeal made by supporters of the President, that his reforms will see the same dynamic. Huey Long or Walter Reuther or Martin Luther King or whatever other critics did not create space on the right for the reforms to get overturned.
Bill Clinton is fond of telling an anecdote about the 1993 budget fight, which generally goes that he told Bernie Sanders how he should have pushed him more strongly from the left to give him more space to maneuver. Clinton resorted to the same point in responding to Lane Hudson about gays in the military. This is a familiar pattern, and furthermore, most progressives critical of the President on certain issues are doing so because they prefer an alternative on the issues themselves. It is not enough to say “take the long view” and succumb to a policy which people believe is insufficient to the task. We have 10% unemployment, rising health care costs, an oil gusher in the Gulf, a failing war in Afghanistan. Progressives don’t have time for the long view.
Tomasky has made a case for historical perspective, but not that progressives who in his view fail to account for that perspective poison the debate in any way. In other words, he wants to say that people should not criticize the President’s works, but he has made no case for the proposition that they must not.
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Link:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/06/15/answering-tomaskys-defense-of-presidents-against-progressive-pressure/:shrug:
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