Category Archives: Conservatism

Some Essays That Every Progressive Should Read

Posted on by | 4 Replies

I'm collecting articles and videos that examine many of the key problems facing Progressivism in the United States. I grow weary of tweeting them individually, so I thought I would combine them here. Where appropriate, I sometimes link to introductory blog posts which I felt might properly frame or augment the work. I also toss in a much older post on Conservatism… because  I can. If you like this sort of compendium, you may also may want to see my Rants & Primers page. I hope you will please pass them on via the Tweet button below.

Scroll the Table of Contents to see all the titles. Click the bold & underlined title above each blurb to read the essay.

[table-of-content title=””]

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

by Sara Robinson

This is now my number one must read on this page and is likely to remain so for quite some time. It's a brief and concise primer on just what the cultural forces have been at play for 400 years, which have led to this rank devolution of the American experiment.  A demotion from which will probably never recover until we fight a more honest Civil War; one that addresses the enemy''s true nature and motives, and not merely the digestible political ploys and pretexts of the day, as we experienced in the 1860s.

It is No Mystery: The Real Reason Conservatives Keep Winning 

by Joe Brewer

I am much happier when Brewer focuses on things like this, rather than trying to persuade me that merely playing with words and "frames" will change anything.

Have you ever wondered why it is that Progressives repeatedly lose ground in American politics? We almost always have the facts on our side. The experts agree with us. Hell, a lot of us are the experts. And yet history clearly shows that Conservatives have the best political game in town. They dominate political discourse, establishing which frames shape the most important issues of the day. 

What’s going on here? Why is it that Conservatives are so good at winning and Progressives produce a lackluster resistance at best? The answer comes from a fundamental insight from evolutionary biology. Stated simply, it goes like this:

When two groups compete, the one with the most social cohesion wins in the long run.

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. 

By Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein

Few articles like this have ever been written in the history of American politics. And the book from which it comes is an extremely important read.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition

Land of Promise

by Michael Lind

Let's stop with the obsolete Left vs Right labels, which just confuse people, and mean less and less as this battle goes on.  Conservatives and Liberals are basically in a duel to the death over which two philosophical outlooks should prevail: The Jeffersonian or the Hamiltonian views of government. This is a must read book, but this article gives you a taste of it.

“But that would not be true,” he continues. “What is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school.”

Hamiltonian development built the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the land-grant universities and the Interstate highway system. In the process, the United States became a giant, interconnected market, a place where companies like Standard Oil, General Motors, John Deere and Sears Roebuck could thrive. The government — and the American military in particular — also played the most important role in financing innovation at its early stages. The industries that produced the jet engine, the radio (and, by extension, the television), radar, penicillin, synthetic rubber and semiconductors all stemmed from ­government-financed research or procurement. The Defense Department literally built the Internet.

How Ralph Nader’s Sins Set Trayvon Martin’s Killer Free

The Powell Memo is still not fully understood by far too many Americans—especially on the Left.  Jonathan Alter frames it all quite perfectly here. If you have never seen the entire Powell Memo, do so after you read this introduction to it.  You will have a clearer understanding of how just how a dangeous conservative extremism has managed to seize control of America

By Michael Kazin

You just can't understand where the American Left is now,  unless you really understand where it was, and how it got here. Michael Kazin is an historian, and long-term observer of the Left, its expectations, its successes, and its more recent wallowing in failure.  This piece is essential reading. In discussing it, RedEarth at Democratic Underground writes:

The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

Sadly, that triumph has been all but obliterated by a Left that assumed it had won the broader economic war, and set out to win every cultural war on its agenda. The impact was to dilute its ranks, obfuscate its purpose, and minimize its power.  We must get it back.

How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

By Andrew Sullivan

Sometimes it takes a conservative to explain Obama's long game strategy to progressives, who have never been very patient (see next essay too)

 But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?

By Jonathan Chait (Introduced and augmented by Bob Cesca)

Former New Republic editor, Jonathan Chait explains a basic fact: Liberals have always been dissatisfied with the Democratic presidents they elect, and then mythologize them after they leave power.  He details how modern liberals are ignorant or unwilling to look at those presidencies as a mix of some successes, and a whole bunch of failures, yet still posture as if all those disappointing white presidents should still be the measuring stick for our only black one.  I don't feel he gets into just how much of this national liberal malaise is actually promoted by a very small cadre of liberal bloggers and the "professional left."  Take away Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher

Related:

Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals

By Tim Wise

This is simply a must read. It not only debunks Ron Paul as anything like a serious option for progressives, but he destroys ridiculous pseudo progressive rationales from people like Glenn Greenwald that pretends he has anything to offer them at all:

I want those of you who are seriously singing Paul’s praises, while calling yourself progressive or left to ask what it signifies — not about Ron Paul, but about you — that you can look the rest of us in the eye, your political colleagues and allies, and say, in effect, “Well, he might be a little racist, but…
http://www.timwise.org/2012/01/of-broken-clocks-presidential-candidates-and-the-confusion-of-certain-white-liberals

President as Piñata

By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times

Kristof always comes around to making the big observation when it most counts. If liberals don't recognize who the real enemy is (radical conservatism), and soon, we're all in for some pretty rough water ahead:

"In this economic crisis, Obama will face the same headwinds. That should provide a bracing warning to grumbling Democrats: If you don’t like the way things are going right now, just wait."

Health Insurers Now Have To Take Their Medicine

By Karoli

Despite the best efforts of Jane Hamsher, and all the other professional left demagogues who have torn it down, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) had a very big time-bomb inserted into it. One that was too wonky to even be understood by the media, and most of the left taken in by all the "sell out" narratives which polluted our national health care dialog. Read here just how the ACA was always designed to eventually change our health care system forever by deconstructing the very financial appeal of private health insurance.

What if Obama Loses?  Imagining the consequences of a GOP victory.

Compendium of Essays Assembled By Washington Monthly Magazine

"But there’s also a widespread assumption that extreme positions taken in the primaries will fade in the general election as candidates “move to the center,” and will disappear entirely once the serious business of governing begins. Surely President Newt Gingrich would not get rid of child labor laws. Surely President Perry would not seek to eliminate three cabinet departments.

 

We don’t think that this year, with this GOP, those assumptions are warranted. And so we asked a distinguished group of reporters and scholars to think through the hitherto unthinkable: What if one of these people actually wins?"

Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas

By A. Jay Adler

It is no secret that I find the overread and overrated blogger Glenn Greenwald to be a pretentious phony and rather an insult to a long tradition of progressive thinkers and writers with whom too many other overpaid pundits mistakenly associate him. He doesn't discuss ideas, he flogs political demons as a career objective, upbraids government and chief executives for sport, and continually masks whatever emotional monsters compel him to lash out at his growing numbers of critics, such as yours truly.  Why should we care? Because his thinly disguised, poorly formed libertarian agenda, and vicious attacks on Democrats (and anyone in power) are often taken seriously by a growing sea of 3rd-rate pundits writing way outside their weight class. He provides them with easy polemical diatribes mixed with tendentious word salad that provides them with rich and controversial content they can report on, rarely bothering to vet it for facts or relevance.  If it bleeds it leads and Greenwald's prose drips with the blood he drains out of any public figure or action he chooses to gut with his digital pen. And he has a famous habit of trying to badger and browbeat his critics all over the internet with shrill accusations of corrupt motive, egregious malice, or any one of several pet forms of bad faith. Often his more scholarly critics will risk accusations of cowardice, simply because they resent his uncivil and intellectually dishonest manner of discourse. His popularity (at least until this year) says far more about our vanishing standards for thoughtful writers than it says about his modest intellectual stature. It is a continuing shame that so few writers with intellectual firepower will take him on as forcefully as this one does.

The author of this essay is a Professor of English at Los Angeles Southwest College. But from this profile you can clearly see why he can so easily dissect Greenwald. He's a real human being, with rich life experiences, who can discuss politics and philosophy in the context of his — and our — lives.  If you read Greenwald much, you know there is no life in anything he writes about. His words are acerbic, glum, and dispiriting. His common goal is to paint incendiary and dehumanizing portrayals of anyone who has ever sought to serve in government.  He never has his own expertise or solutions to bring to his narratives. The goal is to always tear down someone else, and drive his readers into pitchforked frenzies of ideological zeal.  He does it so well that his screeds will suck all the oxygen from the national conversation whenever he drops a new one at Salon.com, the Guardian.co.uk, or whichever venue is giving him space that day.

To some minds, including mine, he is a viciously judgmental person with no real beliefs to be found outside of the palpable hatred he exhibits for the powerful people who control the nation he left (he now lives mostly in Brazil). He writes manipulatively, mostly to advance himself and whatever agenda he rationalizes in his own head (he never writes of any goals or objectives for himself or society, except in the broadest possible terms that can never be challenged by any self respecting liberal), until the topic has been exhausted in the media. When challenged, he is lightning fast in responding with a tweet or a blog comment that avoids any response to the criticism, deflecting with some shrill label for his accuser like "cultist!" or "mentally deranged sycophant!," or some other churlishness that would embarrass him if serious people were paying as much attention as they should be. Once he's milked his subject for a few weeks, often distracting the entire nation with it, he drops it like a stone and moves on to his next equally vitriolic contrivance. He is the anti-government, anti-social, and anti-joy blogger, who does nothing to help America battle its way back from its slide into the radical conservatism that has consumed it, choosing instead to be a high profile careerist lobbing spitballs at the powerful from the comfort of his not-very-cheap seats in Rio de Janerio.

After seven years of getting by with very little real criticism, many are finally coming to see just how Glenn Greenwald operates, and how fragile his intellectual stature really is. Hopefully, this essay will be the first of many to take a swing at his glass jaw. I found it brilliant.

Proud To Be A Liberal

By Brian Elroy McKinley

Excellent overview of some of the most misunderstood (and misrepresented) aspects of Liberalism, and why it's always been seen as sitting at the very base of American values (according to almost any non-partisan historian or political scientist).

By David Frum (Introduced and commented on by @shoq)

Former Bush speechwriter, David Frum explains why his precious Republican party and much of conservatism have devolved into a trade fair for ideological and personality marketing.  The takeaway from this is that these are not responsible people, are sociologically reckless, and are incapable of anything like what we once thought governing was supposed to be about.

Note: Mediamatter's Jamison Foser has urged me many times to see Frum as a manipulative phony quarterback who routinely fakes left, but runs right, blowing a lot of pseudo-moderate smoke to steer Republicans toward his preferred (only slightly less crazy) candidates such as Mitt Romney. I realize there may be a lot of that in Frum's motivations, but that doesn't mean some of his analysis is not on-point, nor useful to the left for its indictment of so many aspects of this Republican noise machine run amok.  Read his take on Frum here.

The Professional left

by Rootless_e, ThePeoplesView.net

A good introduction to the professional left, and why many of us feel it's hurting Progressivism and America.

Fight the People: 40 years and counting of left wing failure in America

by Rootless_e

Progressives vs. the President

by Bob Cesca, Blogger

Bob is one of the few bloggers from the glory years of progressive blogging whom I find myself in agreement with most of the time. That's partly due to our similar pragmatic bent, and partly because he's a lot smarter and more eloquent than I am.  Bob was a front-line blogger when the American left was duking it out over Obama, Clinton and Edwards in the primaries, and knows first hand that most of the so-called Progressive left never supported Barack Obama in the first place. Most of them were John Edwards supporters. And yeah, that judgment worked out well for us, eh?  Below are some other must read posts from Bob that are well worth the read by anyone who wants to more clearly understand where so much of this misplaced anger at Obama really comes from, and how it gets memed all over the Internet, often with very destructive effects on broader progressive narratives, interests and goals:

Has American-Style Conservatism Become a Religion?

by Joshua Holland, Alternet

Josh is one of the most even-handed, level-header journalists writing today. This essay is a must read to grasp the forces at work inside the often overlapping Conservative and Republican machines.

What is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?

By Philip E. Agre

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

How Bullshit Magically Turns Into Fact

By @Karoli

My good friend Karoli takes on a topic that has consumed both of us, and our friends, for years: how the entire angry political blogosphere, whether right, left or libertarian, seems to need to magically transform bullshit into fact.  If you like this essay, you are sure to enjoy these other work of hers, each hitting a different bullseye on a different target, but all on the same shooting range of social justice.

Barack Obama and the myth of the progressive ‘majorities’

By Joy Ann Reid

I continually point out that I think Joy is one of America's best political analysts working today. Here she completely guts the ridiculous assertion, so often made by disaffected liberals, that President Obama squandered huge progressive majorities that he never actually had.

List of Liberal Achievements that Made America a Great Nation

By Shoq Value

They pretty much speak for themselves.

How I Left The Left

By CitizenK (Blogger)

"It's an article of faith among the left that its harsh — and often brainless and naive — criticism of President Obama puts it squarely in line with the left wing "insurgencies" (as Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote) that pushed Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to the great reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society. This might be a fair point if it bore any actual relationship to reality."

George Carlin on The America Dream

I often like to discuss the difference between diagnosing a problem, and treating one. George never spent much time on the latter, but when he engaged in the former, few could match his brilliance.

Why I am Not Disappointed by President Obama

By Jake Lamar

On October 8, 2011, Democrats Abroad France held an event titled "Voices for Obama" at the Nikki Diana Marquandt Gallery in Paris. One of the speakers was the American author Jake Lamar

Journalists Swing The Tire.

by prolefeedTV

A VERY important short video about how our precious Fourth Estate is now little more than a yard sale. But hey, and least there's a swing in the yard!

A Progressive Mission Statement: Positive Goals to Move Progressives Forward

by Milt Shook

My friend Milt has a gift of making the complicated sound simple. But then, some things are simple to start with, such as most of his rather intuitive bullet points as listed here.

The Rise of the New Global Elite

by Chrystia Freeland

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

Why Obama hasn’t closed Guantánamo camps

But Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives anywhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.

[/table-of-content]

See Also

Like Him or Not, This Ain’t The Same Old David Frum

Posted on by | 4 Replies

Three weeks ago, I tweeted this:

@shoq: Somewhere, deep inside @DavidFrum, there’s a useful progressive yearning to be free: j.mp/tcQXDr #p2

I was being a bit glib about it, but I was trying to express an intuition about a sense I’ve had about a slow and sometimes erratic transformation in Frum’s daily political countenance.  And I got some swift kicks for it from liberal friends, particularly the esteemed Jamison Foser at Mediamatters.  But my point was that anyone who has watched him the past few years can see that, if certainly not a liberal emerging, he was at least a devout conservative who was frequently bucking the tide of wretched effluent spewing from that culvert of catastrophe called the Republican party.

I so loathed him as the architect of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, that it took me years of reading him to even begin to consider him as anything more than a skilled propagandist who would throw polemical trojan horse bon bons at the left, so he could poison their narratives with a stealthy political rhetoric packed deep within.

But while almost every other actual or self-styled conservative intellectual (forgive the oxymoron) has laboriously propped up the growing Republican stupidocracy, he’s been one of the very few to consistently show that not all conservatives have surrendered to a future history that will inevitably paint them as completely batshit crazy.

While Foser’s cautions never go unheeded, I think this week, I’ve been proved more right than wrong in my instincts. Frum has just published a scathing evisceration of everything wrong with, if not conservative philosophy as a whole (which would be a nice next step), but at the very least, the feckless and reckless Republican party that now makes a mockery of any pretense it had that it was capable of leading this nation out of the terrifyingly deep hole that it helped to dig for us.

Far from a delicately nuanced piece that could be labeled as some disingenuous ruse to secure his own @MSNBC TV show, it was a candid, fiery, multi-count indictment of his cherished Republican party.

He titled his opus, thusly:

When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Some of my Republican friends ask if I’ve gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror.

But as he goes on to articulate well, he knows that they won’t look in that mirror, because in fact, most of them can’t look and still keep their jobs or status in the decomposing framework of a political party they have helped to make for themselves and their careers. Finding the GOP to be all but a crippled ideological shell of what it was even a decade ago, he surgically dissects the cacophony of contrivances that that have been created during their exuberant transformation from a political party, into a manipulative marketing firm serving the Teaparty, Fox News, and their many people, products, and pseudo-candidates.

He goes on and on for 5 glorious web pages about how these players have merchandized all of this mayhem with nary a nominal concern for the environmental toxins they’ve introduced into our fragile socio-political eco-system, and each day demonstrate a nearly suicidal disregard for even the most obvious of immediate or long-term fiscal or social consequences.

I have yet to see anyone on the Left do as good a job of exposing the myriad of disastrous moral, ethical and philosophical fails that Frum’s party has brought down upon our once-proud country. He doesn’t touch on their culpability (or his) nearly enough, but what he does do, can be neatly summed up by this:

This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

David Frum is hardly anyone’s idea of a liberal, but he certainly resembles those left leaning Republicans of my youth. We called them Rockefeller Republicans back then. Today, we just call them sane.

I still have no small measure of doubt about Frum and his veracity. His past toadiness will linger for a long time, and I don’t forgive political crimes easily.  And those doubts get compounded by the simple fact that despite this flogging of their failures, he still doesn’t officially renounce and leave his moribund party altogether. He knows that nothing is going to save it. It needs to be completely rehabbed, like some old rendering plant that may find a future reuse, but only after the stench and disease of decades of disgusting entrails have been sandblasted and power-washed away, then resurfaced with many layers of a good anti-fungal primer, followed by a thick top-coat of a quality semi-gloss that is not just more attractive to the mainstream, but also far more off-white than it had been.

But in fairness, as most Progressives know all too well, the Democratic Party could use a similar rehabbing. We have our own layers of repulsive filth to be redressed. It must be transformed from a 19th century relic of capitalist appeasers cloaked in civil rights clothing, into a truly dedicated engine for building a government dedicated to economic fairness and social justice in a new century. While an unlikely trendsetter, perhaps David Frum can start a trend.

I urge you to read his essay with an open mind, and credit him with a credit due. If we can get more of his colleagues to tell more truths like this, and praise them when we do, there may be yet be hope that more cultured and capable intellects can come together and help us find a way to get our cherished old American wagon out of this seemingly bottomless ditch. It’s a long shot, to be sure. But in faint hope,  there can be found some hope. And that’s a lot more hope than we have now.

I hope you’ll pass this on. At the very least, it’s one small step for man, even if we have a very long way to go for the rest of human kind.

See Also

 

Grey Parker Educates Breitbart’s Dana Loesch: Because Someone Had To

Posted on by | 1 Reply

Grey Parker is one of those bloggers you stumble upon when someone in your stream says "you gotta read this."  I did that some months ago, and ever since, I eagerly snap at his posts like a Venus Fly Trap that just got lucky.  Today, Grey decided to respond to the execrable new Tokyo Rose of right wing propaganda, Dana Loesch, the oh-so hot and sassy queen of fabrication and faux-facts, who @CNN had the unmitigated corporatist's gall to make a "contributor."  As if we hadn't had enough of these pugnacious media sociopaths, such as her bilious boss, Andrew Breitbart, this gussied-up raconteur of packaged hate aimed at anyone but the elites who butter her daily bread has all the charm and grace of a hand grenade tossed into an infant care ward. 

Despicable Dana (DD), as I call her, had posted the following within one of her more scurrilous screeds over at bigJournalism.com (a site so misnamed that still makes me throw up a little in my mouth each and every time I see it),

"I loathe when American conservatives define themselves as “right wing” anything, even in jest — just as I loathe when the liberal press uses it as identification for American conservatives — because it is an inaccurate use of the term."

Spotting yet another professional hit job on the truth, worthy of anything Jonah Goldberg, the Right's minister of mawkish meanderings about whatever fake histories appealed to him on any given day might have contrived, Grey proceeds to educate DD on her grotesque misunderstandings and misrepresentations of history, as well as her felonious overreliance and misuse of Wikipedia.  Thankless job of evisceration that it was, Parker works his words like a righteous saber, leaving little more than entrails and eye shadow on the floor.

Enjoy reading it: Here You Go, Dishonest Coward 

For posts such as that…

…I have added Grey to my growing list of writers who demonstrate great understanding and insight when explaining the history and precedents of what brought America to this increasingly sad and sinking ship of state where fallacies get more attention than facts, and the fancy-faced, canard-spewing carnival barkers like Loesch get rich by advancing any misinformation that benefits the very worst class of elites the world has seen in modern times.  

Fairly soon now, I hope to deploy this small army of articulators in a unique way, well before the 2012 election, with this attenuating hope that there is still enough respect for truth left in America that basic facts can still have a bit more influence than complete and utter falsehoods. An inventor by trade, I didn't actually want to spend my creative time finding and popularizing new ways of correcting the lies and distortions in the Right's public narratives, but it's been increasingly clear that someone has to do it. When the time comes, I sure hope Grey will join me.  My gut says he will, but to even my surprise, I'm wrong  a lot :)

And now this:

I know it's been a long while since my last post. I just have too many projects and too little time. But as important and real as that excuse is, another is that I've really come to enjoy tweeting the thoughts and ideas of other people saying what I might have wanted to say, but who say it far better than I would have.  We all have our talents and passions. At this time, I am content that one of mine is promoting those whose stable of skills at informing and truth telling are a good deal deeper than my own.