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Saturday, April 18, 2009

Be Reasonable

Bush was so bad, and the direction America was heading under Bush was so disastrous, that those who sought to speak about it "reasonably" often seemed thereby to endorse obvious tyranny, criminality, and madness as though they were within the bounds of the viable, failing to grasp that this concession itself not only facilitated but functionally constituted the very devastation of standards, legitimacy, reasonableness to which they imagined themselves committed in their failure. That was a terrible problem.

A whole new set of problem emerges now because Obama is not only not as bad as Bush, not only is his Administration and the Democratic Congressional majority not driving America in the disastrous direction devoutly wished for by the movement Republicanism consummated and disgraced by the Bush Administration, not only are we conspicuously reversing America's course before our eyes day by day to avert the very crisis of the last years, but, frankly, more than that, Obama is simply the best, most progressive, most talented, most pragmatic, most popular President in my lifetime, probably in generations, and, it is to be hoped, the greatest President since FDR.

He is all those things without being anything remotely like being right all the time, or as progressive in all things as I for one would like. But those who are not being reasonable about Obama's present difficulties in enabling and facilitating best-progressive outcomes in a world of flawed laws and corrupt institutions and actually powerful anti-progressive constituencies, those who measure Obama's performance against presently unattainable standards and in finding him wanting as a result declare him to be a betrayer of progressive democratic ends, or to find him indistinguishable from Bush risk undermining his power as a change agent in the left wing of the actually possible.

If you are frustrated about what appears to you (as it might also so appear to me) to be Obama's too-corporatist response to the financial crisis, if you are frustrated in what appears to you (as it might also so appear to me) to be Obama's too complacent response to the lawlessness of the Bush-epoch, the thing to do is to organize on that basis to push Congress from Obama's left to "make him do it" -- support the ACLU, and EFF, and the members of the Progressive Caucus, and many others who are saying very much the same things and are actually palpably in a position to do something about them. The thing not to do is to throw up your hands like a prima donna in discovering that Obama is unable as well as uninterested in unilaterally implementing democratic socialism or its like on an America that doesn't seem particularly eager in the main to embrace your vision (however much I might or might not sympathize myself with it).

Nobody reasonable actually thinks Obama is a messiah rather than simply a President who truly is and can be a progressive change agent if we support him and push him to do what he knows we elected him to do. So, do please stop pretending it is helpful endlessly to point out that Obama is not such a messiah. It was indeed helpful to a point to point out that Bush was a diabolical force (I indulged my share of that sort of thing right here on this blog for years), but it is just plain laziness to fancy that the work or progressives now is simply to expose Obama as less than angelic. Things are harder now for the likes of us, more complicated, because, among other things, we are actually assuming a measure of real responsibility as a represented majority in the institutions of governance of our own country.

Retreating into facile idealizations at a time like this, indeed just a hundred days into a new actually progressive Administration beset by crisis on all sides (hell, some progressives scarcely waited more than a week to start to declare their sense of betrayal and disinvestment in a non-messianic Obama) is profoundly unserious, it reveals an essentially aesthetic or moralistic attitude toward the work of actual progressive democratization, in my view.

It's not that I think this sort of narcissistic radical left rejectionism is really all that rampant -- in fact, I think that most people are very supportive and understanding of our great President -- nor is it that I think people aren't entitled to their different opinions or anything like that, however useless in my own opinion. Let a bazillion flowers bloom and all that, let freedom ring, let your freak fags fly, and so on.

It's just that some of the very figures to whom I turned most frequently for sanity in the depths of Bush's killer clown epoch, now seem to me to be among the few who are applying comparably uncompromising standards to the Obama Administration, exercising a kind of misplaced consistency that in denying differences that make a different in the changed circumstances of our historical moment and the actual chance it represents, amount when all is said and done to the assumption of a level of abstraction away from the lived details of political reality that render their judgments the furthest thing from sanity.

When the direction of the country changes for the better by your lights, you have to alter your strategies to mobilize and multiply the momentum of that promising movement. You protest to frustrate only the momentum that is leading us all to disaster. Intelligence changes with changed circumstances.

Those who are presently losing their minds over Obama's "betrayal" of the far left vision they seem to have fantasized his election would impose of America for some reason (a far left where, mind you, I reside myself, so it's not like you need to convince me of the appeal of the vision of a democratization of all spheres of public life, including economic life) are exactly as useless and silly, finally, as those racist secessionist libertopian hicks who are presently losing their minds over what they imagine to be Obama's "success" in imposing precisely this far left vision on an unwilling America, presumably by rebuilding the re-education camps as well as nudging tax rates slightly back in the direction of what we all know to have been the totalitarian socialism of the Clinton-era 1990s.

Precisely because Obama is reasonable (even where I find him wrong), while Bush was the iceberg tip of an irrationalism now exposed in its full-on fulsome fulminating ridiculousness in the present marginality and hate-mongering of the tea-baggers and theocrats of the bedraggled GOP Rump, those who would demand Obama be unreasonable in the service of righteousness (even where I find them right) are just as wrongheaded and frustrating to this moment of progressive promise as were those who pretended to find the GOP reasonable in their palpable madness and authoritarianism.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Obama is simply the best, most progressive, most talented, most pragmatic, most popular President in my lifetime, probably in generations, and, it is to be hoped, the greatest President since FDR.Really? How would you respond to this article?

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13362078

Dale Carrico said...

My response?

Exactly as before.

Obama is simply the best, most progressive, most talented, most pragmatic, most popular President in my lifetime, probably in generations, and, it is to be hoped, the greatest President since FDR.

Perhaps I should have added, here on planet Earth.

I'm eager to know who you think could have been elected who would be better, more progressive, more talented, more pragmatic, more popular President than Obama, or, frankly, even remotely as good, progressive, talented, pragmatic, and popular, and what she or he would have done exactly that would have been better over these last one hundred days in this actual country in this actual historical moment confronting these actually existing circumstances than Obama has done.

It remains to be seen if the policy prescriptions on which I presently disagree with Obama will pan out better than I worry they will (and I for one can celebrate a President with whom I disagree on quite a lot, I'm used to it after a lifetime of disagreement with pretty much every President on pretty much every issue), on financial bailouts that seem to leave too many foxes to guard the henhouse, for example, and on his apparent reticent to prosecute criminal wrongdoing in the previous Adminstration.

It actually is an open question whether Obama is proceeding stepwise to facilitate outcomes with which I will better sympathize in the longer term in the face of actually powerful forces of opposition that are quite easy to dismiss when one is simply flinging abstractions around.

There are re-regulation of financial institutions battles to come, there are union supportive battles to come, there are progressive taxation battles to come, there are public health care reform battles to come. These puzzle-pieces are all in play, you don't just throw pixie dust at them and get what you want just because nearly everybody has finally come around to agree with those of us who said George W. Bush was a feudal throwback from the beginning of his killer clownshow.

Actually, I am making a stronger claim than that Obama is better and is doing better than anybody else on offer, I am making the stronger claim that Obama is showing signs of actual greatness in the service of progressive change in America, against terrible odds and in the nick of time.

That I believe that without being the least bit ignorant about his shortcomings or in some sort of romantic haze about his qualities is simply a complexity you're going to have to cope with. Obama could have done far worse than he has done and still be a good sight better than Clinton was.

However unhappy I have been with many of his decisions so far, overall I remain thrilled about the direction Obama has taken the country, the transformation of the terrain of the possible he has facilitated, the unbelievable forces and monies he is releasing to do great progressive work that cannot be easily be undone, the reversals of illegal, immoral, hateful, unscientific policies.

So, yes, really. The greatest president since FDR, or so we may reasonably hope as we have not been able to do in half a century. I doubt you would have been particularly thrilled with FDR either as he made his deals in the meat grinder of stakeholder politics.

To pronounce him a failure is the most flabbergasting idiocy imaginable in my view, apart, I suppose, from imagining him some stainless saint enacting the Green Party program in a nation that doesn't seem much to want that at all at present, even if I might personally find it congenial.

Do, please, though, send me links to the hundreds of articles available pointing to the Obama Administration's legion disappointments and failures of policy. Contemplating such endless failures one no doubt pines for the searing successes of the Bush right-wing and the brilliant triangulators of the pre-Obama DLC. Now, that was some change we can believe in.

*barf*

Anonymous said...

I'm eager to know who you think could have been elected who would be better, more progressive, more talented, more pragmatic, more popular President than Obama, or, frankly, even remotely as good, progressive, talented, pragmatic, and popular, and what she or he would have done exactly that would have been better over these last one hundred days in this actual country in this actual historical moment confronting these actually existing circumstances than Obama has done.John Edwards. ;)

Dale Carrico said...

John Edwards. ;)Early on I was a big booster for John Edwards, as you may know. What a disaster that would have been! I still think his "Two Americas" discourse on poverty is enormously compelling (with the noble ghost of Michael Harrington cheering him on behind his shoulder), but I am not at all convinced Edwards would have been pragmatically better on poverty or facilitating union organizing than Obama is being now. The fact is, early on I underestimated Obama and I was wrong and I was convinced by Obama himself that I was wrong over the course of his comsummately competent and inspiring campaign. Also, I had a lot of marvelous students whose energetic and informed disagreements with me on Edwards versus Obama tipped the balance into enthusiastic support for Obama rather quickly once Edwards dropped out.

Anonymous said...

It's just that some of the very figures to whom I turned most frequently for sanity in the depths of Bush's killer clown epoch, now seem to me to be among the few who are applying comparably uncompromising standards to the Obama Administration, exercising a kind of misplaced consistency that in denying differences that make a different in the changed circumstances of our historical moment and the actual chance it represents, amount when all is said and done to the assumption of a level of abstraction away from the lived details of political reality that render their judgments the furthest thing from sanity.Since your blog doesn't attract much attention, have you actually written to these people to tell them just that?