Cheering the Team

I caught this article by Jeffery Young at The Hill (h/t Matt Yglesias) discussing the health care bill with Andy Stern of the SEIU.  Now the comments on the health bill are worth in themselves.  But one thing in the article particularly caught my attention, not with regard to the health care bill particularly, but rather with regard to how progressives approach politics and the rather limited success we’ve had in advancing policies we want.  At one point Young writes

Stern expressed strong frustration with the Senate and with those centrists -- without calling any out by name -- and hinted that labor unions and their members, who contributed with money and effort to winning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, would be less motivated next time around.
“Democrats were given a gift that they have squandered,” Stern said. “If this is the way the Senate is going to do business when they have 60 votes, they’re pretty much guaranteeing a self-fulfilling prophecy that they won’t have 60 votes.”

a view similar to what I’ve seen a lot from various liberal bloggers radio hosts and the like.  Given the Democrats failure to deliver all that we hoped we won’t be there to give them our support in the future. 

This seems to me, however, to be a strange attitude toward the political process.   It is almost as we are supporting not a political party but a musical group or a sports franchise, and if they disappoint us the fans won’t show up at the part.  But the Democratic party is not really like a sports franchise that will have to live the misfortune of lower attendance if we, the fans, aren’t happy with how they perform.  The political parties are the instruments we have for achieving our policy objectives.   If we stay away from the polls then it is true that the Democratic party will feel some disappointment (although I doubt that it is actually as much as a lot of progressives believe) but it is also the case that other people when then be setting the nations policies.  Experience indicates that that will mean that really terribly bad polices will be established rather than merely disappointing policies.

I’ve discussed elsewhere what seems to be the progressives strategy and that it has been a striking failure.  As a movement we stayed away from the polls in ‘68 to get Nixon, and stayed away in ‘80 to get Reagan and stayed away in ‘00 to get Bush.  The policies that have come out of staying away have been quite a disaster from a progressive viewpoint.  Yet we persist in this strategy, and I see echoes of it in the comments of Andy Stern and others

On the flip side of this discussion, however, is this article by Seth Maxon from In These Times.  Apparently, Michigan Socialists are having some electoral success and political influence by working with the local Democratic party rather than opposing them.  To summarize

The secret to their success, says Green, is thinking strategically.

“As a small organization, how can we make a difference? We leverage our forces. We put our efforts towards a progressive Democrat challenging a Republican, or a progressive Democrat challenging a centrist Democrat [in a primary]. “

“We don’t pick symbolic victories,” Green says, “We pick things we can win.”

After deciding whom to support, Detroit DSA carefully chooses tactics that will have the greatest impact, all of which are based on the leftist tradition of on-the-ground, grassroots action.

This seems eminently sensible to me.  The route to political success is to move the political process in the direction you want, not to call upon political purity of all those you associate with.

This also touches on another issue one often hears about in left wing political commentary, namely the formation of a third party.  We’ve all heard before the kind of claim that the Democrats are all corrupt and sell outs to Industry, or whatever, so we need to form a new political party.  This too seems quite misguided.  Forming a political party is enormously expensive in terms of time and effort, as well as money, and the influence of a third party is very limited.  A much better path is the one followed by the Michigan Socialists above, form a coalition or section within the Democratic party.  Have members of the Democratic party move the Democratic party to the left.  People tend to think of the parties as being fixed entities, and indeed it is generally the case that they change slowly, but they do change.  The Democratic party of a hundred years ago could hardly have been the one to elect the first Black President, and the Republican party of the same time was not the holdout of the nations Confederate apologists.  The Democratic party can be made more progressive than it is and it already has a great deal of the infrastructure needed to get people elected and to shape policy.  Use that existing infrastructure rather than try to build a new one. 

Another way to consider what is needed is not to think of the Democratic party as a whole.  Rather consider that there are a number of people in Congress who are doing the work we want, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, Chuck Schumer, etc.  Given that these folks are trying to advance the kind of policies we want, and trying to stop those policies we don’t want, we should consider how to best help them do this.  Obviously, electing a whole slew of really progressive Democrats (or whatever's) would be best, but clearly seeing a bunch of conservative Republicans elected would not be helpful.  More Democrats would help (60 is a much better number than 59, but we really need 62 or 63).  The more progressive better still, but any but the most conservative Democrats would be a boost, and even some of those might not be bad if it brought us over 60.  

Progressive Obama

There is quite a bit of buzz around the blogesphere lately with regard to whether or not Obama is really a progressive, really wants progressive policies to be realized and the like. There is Matt Taibi's article in Rolling Stone. Then there are Digby's comments. Matt Yglesias has a response, and Steve Bennen chimes in. There are also comments from a reader at TPM. And follow the links you can get more comments on the comments and so forth.

I haven't much to add to the discussion above on how accurate Matt Taibi's view is or how good Obama's progressive credentials are. But I do have two thoughts to add.

One is that this discussion, it seems to me, confuses two distinct points. If the question is whether or not Obama is truly a progressive and how righteous a progressive he is, I do not know. Should Obama be admired as a great progressive? I have no idea. Is Obama to blame for the difficulty in achieving progressive aims? Hard to tell. Those questions are very difficult to resolve and really are largely a matter of opinion. However, they are also, I believe, not all that important. If, on the other hand, we are interested in the best way to advance Progressive policies then Obama was certainly the best choice in the general election, and I hardly believe a poor choice for the Democratic party. If we are concerned about advancing Progressive policies then supporting Obama is our best choice. I would suggest also that Matt Yglesias's views on how we need to reshape Congress is the next place for progressives to act. At this point, whether or not Obama is as progressive as he promised (and he might well not be), the sticking point is Congress. The fact that we have been counting on Joe Lieberman as a Democrat is a far greater problem than Obama's lack of progressiveness.

The second point that comes to mind with these criticisms of Obama is that Progressives seem intent on continuing the strategy that has a) been pursued steadily for a half-century and b) been a total disaster. The progressive community backed away from supporting Johnson in 1968. They were then disillusioned by his involvement with and commitment to the Viet Nam war. Likewise they were only lukewarm about Humphry due to his connection to that war. They were determined to show the Democratic party that it needed to be true to its progressive ideals. Nixon won the election. The Democratic party responded with McGovern who was crushed. The Democrats did come back with Carter, who in tern failed to live up to our progressive ideals and who met with a liberal challenge from Kennedy. Liberals were unwilling to support a Democratic party that abandoned its progressive ideals. Reagan won the election. Another set of true Democratic progressives and another set of stunning defeats. Then the Democratic party got Clinton elected. Clinton of the DLC and triangulation also did not quite live up to our progressive ideals and so support for Gore was again lukewarm as many liberals were unhappy supporting a candidate that did not truly embrace liberalism. We got George W. Bush. Now, once again, the Democrats have elected a president who may not embrace our ideal. Do we abandon support of him and get, what, Sarah Palin for the love of God.

How clear does it have to be made that we would be better off supporting the candidates we have and use our position to push for yet more liberal candidates in the future. We are not going to transform the nation in a single year, or in a single President's term. We need to push for the liberal policies we can get from the political process we have and then push for more liberal policies in the future.

Another note, when people criticize Obama as a failure for progressives, is our love and support for various liberal and Democratic politicians of the past, now when such support is of no value. There has been an abundance of posts and comments lately, progressives calling for Obama to be more like Johnson. Johnson is well respected and admired now, though in 1968 when such admiration would have been some value to the advancement of Progressive causes, it was scarce to be found. Far more progressives today admire Jimmy Carter as the nation's greatest ex-President than could be induced to vote for him in 1980 when progressive causes might have been advanced by such respect. And, of course, Al Gore is now much admired by progressives who, including large numbers who stayed home, or who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Could we not try, just this once, supporting our guy when such support will be of value.

Critical Thinking and Its Alternatives

A good article by Lane Wallace in the Atlantic (ht to Mark Kleiman) on certain aspects of human reasoning that have great relevance to today's political debates. People are not, as all agree, perfectly rational. One irrational thing we do is to cling to beliefs even after evidence clearly indicates these beliefs are factually wrong. And I'm not talking about grand spiritual questions here, but things that are clearly subject to resolution based on evidence. Ms. Wallace, for example, discusses the question of who got to the North Pole first, Cook or Peary. There are people still passionately attached to one conclusion or the other, on this question and many other similar questions, long after the evidence supporting their conclusion has been shown to be inconclusive or in error, and other evidence has indicated some other conclusion is correct.

While most of us, most of the time, will base our conclusions on the evidence, and will alter our beliefs based on what evidence there is and how reliable the evidence is (the reliability of the evidence being based on some independent standard), this is not always what we do. In some cases we will work in the opposite direction, basing our beliefs on some gut level reaction and then judging the evidence as being reliable or not based on whether it supports our conclusion. Mark Kleiman has distinguished these as "data based reasoning" in the first instance and "motivated reasoning" in the second. But by this second method we can never escape our conclusion no matter how wrong it is. This then is the irrationality trap that keeps people believing in things long since shown to be false.

The success of some of our intellectual activities over the past several centuries, science perhaps most notably, is due to recognizing this tendency and to keep the process focused on reasoning from evidence to conclusions. A central aspect of the critical thinking process is that conclusions are always tentative. That is, we believe these things are probably true, but keep in mind that that could be wrong. As long as one does so you do not become so attached to that conclusion that you switch to "motivated reasoning".

People vary in how likely they are to select "data driven reasoning" over "motivated reasoning", but the preference for the later can also be encouraged by better education and better explanation of the critical thinking process. There is also a theological argument for preferring the "data driven approach" that those who are more religiously inclined might be advised to present and perfect.

For any given person engaged in reasoning about the world and trying to understand the world about him, we can assume that said person does not posses the wisdom and omniscience of God. Therefore said person will, in drawing conclusions and listening to his gut often come to erroneous conclusions. It is an arrogant affront to assume that any person is incapable of error. But if the person is possibly wrong in his conclusions then by definition his conclusions are tentative. That is the very meaning of the term. Later evidence or experience might show that the conclusions are in error. A person should, if he does not assume that he is equal to God, treat his own opinions and conclusions as tentative.

Note, however, that the above paragraph is open to a possible misunderstanding, which also gums up our arguments. While I say that all conclusions are tentative, they are not all equally so. All conclusions that have been drawn to date might be overturned by some later evidence, might not all are equally likely to. That the Earth is a spheroid in orbit about the Sun is a tentative conclusion is true, but so well supported by the evidence that it would be absurd to act in any way as if it might be proven wrong. The conclusion that the Moon is the result of an impact with the Earth during the formation of the solar system is also tentative, but somewhat more so. It is not absurd to imagine that future evidence might replace that conclusion with some other, or some modified version of the impact theory. The conclusion that there was life on Mars in the distant past is also tentative, but much more uncertain than the other two. It is based on the evidence for liquid water on that planet and the inconclusive evidence from a meteorite discovered on the Earth.

To be able to have rational discourse on any subject, we need to engage in "data driven reasoning". This requires us to make use of the principals of critical thinking which recognizes that our conclusions are tentative, but we must be able to recognize that they aren't all equally so.

Republican Gimmicks

In this post Matt Yglesias notes another piece of evidence in the absurdity of the current Republican party. Matt is commenting on this post by Patrick Ruffini who is noting the oddity (and lack of seriousness) in the current Republican Party's current obsession with Joe the Plumber. I agree with Mr. Ruffinin in general, although most of his specific comments are far off the mark, but he doesn't seem to get the problem with the current Republican predicament, nor why they cannot escape Joe the Plumber.

The problem Ruffini is facing in trying to pull the Republican party away from gimmicks is that the Republicans are at this point in a bind. Their ideology is tied two unshakable beliefs 1) the government does nothing of value, does nothing to support business, it just ‘interferes’ in the market 2) government functions like copyright protection, licensing the radio waves, and incorporation are absolutely necessary for business to exist. We on the left are pretty sure one of those must be false, and generally believe that the second is true, therefore it makes sense to charge business money to get these services. The Republican party is still wedded to policies which depend upon both being true. The American people are catching on to the absurdity of the conservative position on this. Given that their position is absurd, they have no choice but gimmicks.

On top of that, as Matt notes, Newt’s 80/20 issues are useless for the Republicans. They are 80/20 precisely because they are peripheral and not central to people’s interests. Yes, they are popular, but the 80 percent who favor them are also not really concerned about them.