Ishmael Reed: What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama

[Uzybone]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12reed.html?_...

I thought of them when I pointed out to a leading progressive that the Tea Party included neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers — and he called me a “bully.” He believes that the Tea Party is a grass-roots uprising against Wall Street, a curious reading since the movement gained its impetus from a rant against the president delivered by a television personality on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

And I’ve thought about them as I’ve listened in the last week to progressives criticize President Obama for keeping his cool.

Progressives have been urging the president to “man up” in the face of the Republicans. Some want him to be like John Wayne. On horseback. Slapping people left and right.


When these progressives refer to themselves as Mr. Obama’s base, all they see is themselves. They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos. And now they are whispering about a primary challenge against the president. Brilliant! The kind of suicidal gesture that destroyed Jimmy Carter — and a way to lose the black vote forever.

Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout. The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the unemployed in Chicago, knows too.

[CakeGrrl]

1. k/r

It's been said by more than one author that a primary challenge is NOT going to go the way the primary enthusiasts want for this reason. Articles can be unrecced on DU, but the demographics in the real world cannot.

[elleng]

2. Thanks, Uzy. Posted at Barack Obama group, too.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. bullshitty capitulationist nonsense

Lets start with bullshit number 1:
"I pointed out to a leading progressive that the Tea Party included neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers — and he called me a “bully.”

Nice story. Everyone I know on the progressive left views the teaparty as a rightwing populist movement full of fascists of all sorts. The accomodationists are not on the left.

"Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all"

Well you can take the 'progressive' out of that sentence and no information is lost. Tossing 'progressives' into that was a nice rhetorical trick used to take a fact about a superset: white people, to attempt to generalize about an overlapping set: progressives. Dishonest.

[elleng]

6. Ah yes. Stupidity.

[CakeGrrl]

8. So everyone who disagrees with your POV is "capitulationist"?

With us or against us mentality. Cool.

[Warren Stupidity]

9. no, only the ones boosting capitulation as victory.

It is a very specific set of circumstances that qualifies one as a capitulationist.

[phleshdef]

10. The word capitulation is becoming the left's version of the word terrorist.

Its getting so overused that its losing all meaning.

[ClassWarrior]

16. If you have a problem with "the left," I can point you to at least a few sites where...

...you'll find company that'll make you feel more comfortable.

NGU.

[phleshdef]

21. Oh I'm still very much a socialist, commie, leftist... I'm just not religious about it.

[Donnachaidh]

33. ahhh -- A SINO/Cino/Lino

[Union Scribe]

17. Not to people who knew the meaning well enough to recognize it.

[Hello_Kitty]

19. I feel the same way about "purist".

It's the DLC's version of dirty fucking hippie.

[phleshdef]

20. Well the whole damn thing is turning into "capitulators vs purists" and its getting out of hand.

[Warren Stupidity]

23. well too f'ing bad.

Hundreds of threads all lecturing the left about how childish they are while proclaiming the abject and deliberate capitulation of the post election Obama administration to the right as a Great Victory. I'll call this as what I see it: capitulationism.

[stevenleser]

32. Yes, I note that you keep doing that in spite of Frenchies thread that you obviously read

and whose facts you ignore.

[phleshdef]

36. And I'll call this as what I see it. Keyboard warrior beating his chest...

...and otherwise not doing a god damn thing.

[Warren Stupidity]

39. you need a one word phrase

'keyboard warrior beating his chest' is just not catchy.

[phleshdef]

42. I'd rather be a true progressive instead of playing a parody of one on the internet.

[Warren Stupidity]

46. So these 'true progressives' - they support supplyside tax cuts?

Really?

I'm over here with the fake progressives who don't support reaganomics.

[phleshdef]

51. Middle class tax cuts are demand side, bottom up, non-reaganomic tax cuts.

[Warren Stupidity]

53. no actually tax cut 'stimulation' is classic reaganomics.

what a freaking joke.

"Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering barriers for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates, and by allowing greater flexibility by reducing regulation. Consumers will then benefit from a greater supply of goods and services at lower prices."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

So again - you are a 'true progressive' who boost reaganomics?

[phleshdef]

54. Dead wrong. You need to actually read your own wikipedia link.

Read this ENTIRE section of the sentence:

"economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering barriers for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates"

This is speaking in the sense of the producers and thus when it speaks of adjusting income tax, its speaking of adjusting income tax in a way that benefits producers. Thats not a middle class tax break.

If are adjusting income taxes in such a way that the producers are getting a break, then yes, that is supply side Reaganomics. Adjusting income taxes in and of itself neither favors supply or demand side, it depends on how they are adjusted and for which incomes. If you gave the employer a break on the taxes the employer has to pay per employee, thats supply side. But if you give the tax break to the middle income employee directly, thats demand side.

Middle class tax cuts are not in the supply side vain at all. Middle class tax cuts give relief to the DEMAND side, the people that are the buyers. And if you put more money in their (my) pockets, they (I) will likely spend it on something.

Middle class tax cuts are demand side relief. There is no way to argue around that.

[Warren Stupidity]

55. So you supported the Bush Tax Cuts? The Reagan Tax Cuts?

All of which cut income taxes for the middle class (and of course for billionaires)?

And those policies were not 'supply side reganomics'? Or it is different somehow a 'D' is attached to the bill.

[phleshdef]

58. I support anything that places more wealth into the hands of those that need it most.

I don't care if its through tax cuts, minimum wage increases, social welfare programs or health care subsidies. And I'm not going to hate it just on the principle that Ronald Reagan or George Bush signed it.

Your problem is that you can apparently only think in black and white terms. And thus you are insisting on conflating middle class tax relief with wealthy/corporate tax relief, when the 2 are actually on opposite ends of the spectrum when you compare the dynamics of their effects on the economy. The tax cuts that Bush or Reagan passed that favored the wealthy were supply side at work. The tax cuts that Bush or Reagan passed that gave relief to the middle class were not supply side.

I don't know how many ways there is to say that middle class tax relief is demand side. Anything that puts wealth into the hands of the demanders is demand side.

[niceypoo]

43. It has very strong meaning

It means you have no guts and you can be easily blackmailed

[Name removed]

27. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[niceypoo]

47. So progressives are latte drinking scumbags?

Do they drive Volvo's? Are they also 'touchie feelie' and homo loving?

[msongs]

4. lose the black vote forever? blacks will only vote for a president if he is black? wow! nt

[avaistheone1]

7. Good to know.

[Starbucks Anarchist]

52. Of course not.

But primarying the first black president would be a slap in the face to African-Americans.

[Number23]

62. Dumbest post ever. Seriously.

[OHdem10]

5. Too bad us white folks are not adapting to well. If in the 60s

we would have "settled" there still might not be Civil Rights.

[phleshdef]

11. Civil rights was a fight that began ages before the 60s & there was plenty of settling along the way

What was seen in the 60s was just the beginning of the pay off for the fight. And in a lot of ways, Barack Obama's election was the complete fulfillment of it as far as the African American part of it.

[Dream Girl]

48. Civil rights struggle began in the early 1900s

It did not happen overnight.

[jeanpalmer]

12. What's the connection between

giving tax cuts to big corporations and the rich, and working among the unemployed in Chicago? Why would someone with that background do such a thing? Do blacks and Latinos have big estates that require $10 million exclusions? Every day in the ghetto had to be a reminder for him that trickle down doesn't work. And if they were unemployed when he worked there, they are 99ers who are getting nothing.

[craigmatic]

13. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Many African Americans are liberals and they're just

as disillusioned with Obama as white liberals are. This is about economics and who the president stands with in terms of class, not race politics.

[CitizenLeft]

38. Really? Really? I'm African American, and I work with AA's - every day

Don't see it, don't hear it - not a soul would not vote for him.

[niceypoo]

49. Is that because of skin color?

Or conviction?

[craigmatic]

59. I'm African American too but I have alot of disagreements with the president.

[Union Scribe]

14. "white progressives" are "used to getting it all"?

What the fuck?

"Unlike white progressives...They know how it feels to be unemployed"

Super what the fuck?

I guess when I look around I don't see the "white progressive" paradise the author does. They also suggest that white progressives don't want the same things as minority progressives, since white progressives 'get what they want' and it somehow leaves others in the cold.

It's a pile of divisive, ugly bullshit.

[Dream Girl]

45. It's the truth

[Union Scribe]

56. Explain.

[ClassWarrior]

15. Fuck, what a bigoted post.

"Progressives... ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos??!"

Christ, some of the most steadfast progressives I know are blacks and Latinos.

NGU.

[frazzled]

31. And what an ignorant response

[CitizenLeft]

40. that's nice

But the rank and file African Americans are NOT activist progressives, but Democrats. Let's just dismiss them out of hand, because, after all, they don't post here, and they don't kowtow to you and your "steadfast progressives," so fuck them and what they think.

Sick and tired of this "blacks don't like him too" meme. YOU don't speak for all African-Americans, and neither do I.

[That Guy 888]

18. I'm Latino, somehow I'm still not impressed.

I don't you want to hear this, but here goes. The President from the start excluded "extreme leftist" from his sphere of advisers. DLC and New Democrat Coalition corporate enablers only. That was and is his decision. When "Blue Dogs" obstructed progressive policy as well as what President said he wanted to accomplish, presumably he, through his Chief of Staff, said it was a waste of resources to primary or in any way challenge the people who blocked better deals in the Senate. ( I know that the "realistic" view of centrists is that only blue dogs had a chance at victory. The goppers accomplish the level of harm to this country by not settling for realistic goals)

If someone says anything that brightbart of all people, considers too liberal or involving reverse discrimination that person was fired before any fact checking was done. Meanwhile, when one of the members of the "Catfood Commission" describes Social Security as " ... like a milk cow with 310 million tits!" and habitually refers to Senior Citizens as "greedy geezers" is allowed to keep influencing Federal Policy. For instance, the commission which he is serving on is supposed to examine deficit reduction measures, which doesn't involve Social Security which is funded through payroll deductions. Why doesn't the President tell them in a calm, cool manner to stop looking for Wall Street pipe dreams about the potential fat pile of loot that the SS funds represent and get back to the job they were hired for?

Why didn't the President calmly allow Medical Professionals to testify about Single Payer instead of staying silent as they where hauled off by police because they weren't allowed even the chance to testify.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the President should back my personal beliefs with his time in office. I understand that he does not see Liberals as his base. I'm not saying he should fight for principals he doesn't believe in. It would be nice if at a minimum, he pretended he was as unreasonable as the goppers actually are.

As for the Democratic Party as a whole, I don't see any strategic planning whatsoever. No matter who wins the next election, nor for the next two years do I see ANY plan on how to deal with Citizens United, Massive Election Fraud by goppers(Alvin Greene), or the massive Media machine that just wants more consolidation. I am beginning to suspect that the plan is to collect whatever crumbs our oligarchs allow in return for making sure that the lower 90% income are sensible, and don't trouble the economic elites.

[kayob1]

28. Good Questions

Thanks for posting.

[PurityOfEssence]

22. Yep, white folks suck; don't know how I live with myself

This helps nothing.

This is surely an embarrassment to many.

Those of us of a certain age have happily and vigorously helped to chip away for many years at the advantages our race gives us in this society, and although some do it just for the pat on the back, many have a sincere desire to have everyone in on the banquet of life.

It's natural to have our privilege thrown back in our faces, and that's just human nature, but it's wise to remember that assholiness is an equal opportunity affliction.

Reducing all opposition to Barack Obama to racism helps nobody and simply isn't justified.

Scolding white folks for not being as worldly wise is just pissy, back-alley racism. "Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all." That's just another reminder of how inferior we are as a racial group, unlike our noble and superior kin. Imagine that sentence with "white" swapped for either of the other two groups.

These are tender issues, and these are tender times, but some things need to be said.

Besides all that, being "the coolest man in the room" is a shitty and pathetic thing to worship; that's deeply, deeply superficial and sounds like the vapid gushing of someone reading tabloids. What kind of a addle-headed hipster's love-riff is that?

[Bluenorthwest]

24. A pile of bigoted, racist dung

Seemingly written with the objective of making divisions along arbitrary lines in order to sew discontent. If white people were never unemployed, and actually were used to getting everything they want, this might be more than a sack of prejudice served on toast.
Vile bullshit.

[BeyondGeography]

25. A silly column

[Honeycombe8]

26. I'm not hearing criticism about Obama being too cool about the tax bill...

or that they want him to be John Wayne-like.

I am not a progressive, and my criticism seems to be like the other criticism I hear: What negotiations? Did you hear any demands or negotiations from Obama? Me, neither. Did you hear Obama admit in his press conference that the bill will raise taxes on the poor? Me, neither. Did you hear him admit that the estate tax deal gives Republicans even more than they asked for? Me, neither.

I am not disappointed because he made demands and failed to get them. I am disappointed because, as far as I can tell, he didn't make any demands. The Republicans gave him a wish list of what they would accept before they'd let Obama extend unemployment benefits. And Obama granted their wish.

It just shows how politically naiive he turned out to be. I didn't think he was. But apparently he is. All you have to do is look around: he has alienated his base and created a severe problem for himself in 2012. That alone is evidence that he has made a mistake, regardless of what anyone thinks of the tax bill.

[Jakes Progress]

29. Damn those progressives.

Always agitating and pushing things like civil rights and women's rights and peace. First they just want a fair wage, then before you know it they say everybody gets to vote. There's just no stopping their lust for equality and justice. Damn them.

[frazzled]

30. I suppose not many here know who Ishmael Reed is

I grew up listening to Ishmael Reed on WBAI/Pacifica Radio in New York, during my salad days. I recall the iconic East Village Other he helped found. I used to marvel at the power of his poetic language and his unique voice. He was instrumental in creating the Black Arts movement and a new black aesthetic.

Although a professor at the University of California, Berkeley since the 1960s (he was denied tenure) and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards (he never received either), he is not well known.

Here's a bit of description:

Using analogies from comedy and music, one could argue that Ishmael Reed is much closer to Richard Pryor and In Living Color than he is to Bill Cosby, more akin to George Clinton or Sun Ra than to Wynton Marsalis. Does this help us to place him within the black tradition? At the least, it forces us to relinquish any notion of "the" black tradition; there are, and always have been, several black traditions, sometimes conflicting, sometimes intersecting, but nonetheless coexistent. One of the reasons Reed's reputation has suffered over the years is that he has steadfastly refused to toe any party line with regard to African American authenticity, aspiration, and achievement. Moreover, as the title of his 1993 essay collection, Airing Dirty Laundry, indicates, Reed believes in "outing" what others wish to keep closeted. Rather than working toward closure, he vigorously engages in disclosure. Some critics have interpreted the openness (and occasional open-endedness) of Reed's works as indeterminacy. For example, Michael G. Cooke, in Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century (1984), while emphasizing Reed's importance based upon the distinctiveness of his vision, style, and scope, believes nonetheless that his work is "affected by an instinct of irresolution." Reed's target, however, is the overdetermined, which he combats by accentuating chance, spontaneity, and instinct, deliberately embracing what amounts to an uncertainty principle that acknowledges "other" positions, myriad possibilities.

(...)

The impressive commercial success attained by some African American authors has eluded Reed; yet, over the course of a distinguished and turbulent career, he has received numerous, frequently potent, critical accolades. Musician Max Roach is said to have called Reed the Charlie Parker of American fiction, while Fredric Jameson has judged him to be one of the principal postmodernists. Nick Aaron Ford, in Studies in the Novel (vol. 3, 1971), referred to him as the "most revolutionary" African American novelist to have appeared thus far, and Addison Gayle, Jr., in The Way of the New World (1975), called Reed the best satirist in the black tradition since George S. Schuyler. Acknowledging that his satire does derive in part from Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s essay on Reed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 33), argues that he really has "no true predecessor or counterpart." For Gates, Reed’s situation in the African American literary tradition is both "unique" and "ironic" because the conventions and canonical texts of the tradition itself are the principal targets of Reed’s satire. It is crucial to insist, however, that Reed is in no way indulging in a gratuitous put-down of black writers and writings; rather, he is engaged in a project of emancipating an artistic heritage from predictable or predetermined forms and norms imposed by those who fail to fully comprehend the depth and complexity of that heritage, including its folkish inventiveness, hilarious undercurrents, and seasoned extravagances. Reed, in short, uses tradition to illuminate and reinvigorate tradition, combining continuity and improvisation in a cultural dynamic that Amiri Baraka has astutely dubbed "the changing same."

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/reed/abo...

Just so y'all know who you are calling "bigoted" here. You are possibly the "overdetermined" miscreants against whom Ishmael Reed has bravely taken on in his singular poetry and novels.

[alcibiades_mystery]

34. The Notion that Ishmael Reed ISN'T as Left as They Get is Hilarious to Me

This is a guy I once heard refer to Skip Gates, Cornel West, and William Julius Williams as "the Vichy Regime up at Harvard."

[old mark]

35. Rec. Mr. Reed is correct - the craziness of the "progressives" has really

got out of hand - there is no common sense on the Democratic left at all on this issue.

mark

[JVS]

37. Since when have white progressives been "getting it all"?

[Union Scribe]

57. Still trying to figure that out myself.

No one seems to be able to support the comment, including its author in his own piece.

All I'm getting are resumes and insistances that he's smart so if he said it it must be true.

[zalinda]

41. I'm sorry but if blacks and Latinos can't see

what's going on, then they are the racists. Believe me, if Hillary was pulling the same shit as Obama, I'd be looking for some one to primary against her. Being loyal to "your kind", is just plain dumb. Look at all those people who voted for Bush because he was someone who you wanted to have a beer with. How is supporting a person who is governing your life, with how they look, rather than how they help you, any different?

And, btw, there are almost as many white people in poverty as there are blacks in poverty, but you rarely see them. They are called "white trash", and they are every where. If you aren't poor, maybe you've never seen them, but I've been poor just about all my life. I grew up lower middle class, and "advanced" to poor when I left home. I struggle every day, and have been since I left home at 17, in 1967. We live all over the country, but we are invisible, because society doesn't think we exist. Blacks and Latinos think we have it easy because we are white, but that's not so. In some cases we are worse off than blacks or Latinos, because if you are white you shouldn't be poor. If you are white, you have no excuse for not having a job. There is no affirmative action for poor whites.

The poor should stop making it about race. It is about being poor, and that is the problem. Poverty, whether you are black, Latino or white, is not being addressed. Those who put their faith in Obama because he is a black man, put their faith in the wrong man, no matter what his color. The factory owner is no better than the factory worker, but the owner is treated with respect, where as the worker is treated as a commodity.

zalinda

[Dream Girl]

44. Agree, bunch of spoiled whiny brats who just don't get it

[yurbud]

50. so because blacks and latinos are used to getting little, no one should ask if it was possible to

get more?

[pnwmom]

60. The point of the article is that Obama cannot act like John Wayne,

as some progressives want him to do -- because he will be perceived as the Angry Black Man. Some kind of cross between Malcolm X, Al Sharpton, and the pastor of the Church in Chicago that he used to attend.

[Juche]

61. Are they implying the black vote will go republican?

Good luck. People were saying that in 2008 with the primary, that the black vote would leave the dem party.

Race isn't why people are upset with Obama. It is because he negotiates from a position of weakness.

No idea if a primary would cost him the 2012 election. The 2008 primary in retrospect probably made people get more involved in the general election.

All these same arguments were made in Clinton vs. Obama in 2008. The black vote would leave the dem party, the general candidate would lose, liberals were asking too much, etc. And it was all untrue.

[demwing]

63. So the most consistent Obama supporters are the ones most accustomed to abuse?

What the FUCK does that tell you?

[political_Dem]

64. K and R.

[bushisanidiot]

65. +1

anyone who is pushing for President Obama to be "primaried" is the enemy of the democratic party, if you ask me. It will GUARANTEE that we lose the white house in 2012. I and I agree that it will cause us to LOSE the black vote for a very, very long time.

Presient Obama is the best president I've seen in my lifetime. I will not only back him in 2012, I will DOUBLE my efforts to campaign for him in 2012!!