tristero at Hullabaloo makes a critically important point, today:
Many Top Democrats, today, are Conservatives.

And, what does that make top Republicans?

they are not what we think of as conservatives. . . . , but the standard term, when being polite to them, is "movement conservative." Whatever you call them, they hate liberalism with a passion. And by "liberalism" I mean liberalism as in the Englightenment and the American Founders such as the Jefferson of the Declaration and the letter to the Danbury Baptists. These are people, who are still fighting the battles lost by the Federalists in the earliest days of the United States. These are very, very strange people and there is no common ground to be reached between liberals and them. They can only be defeated and their ideas relegated to the margins of modern American political discourse, where they belong. Fortunately, as powerful as they are, there are not too many of them. Unfortunately, they are extremely good at disguising their extremism; many decent Americans have been bamboozled.

Among the most important ways to defeat movement conservatives is to refuse to take their bullshit seriously, even for a moment. In fact, when they are given undeserved influence and respect, as they were in the months before Bush/Iraq, innocent people die.

On the other hand, dialogue with conservatives, genuine conservatives, is not only possible, but something liberals are having right now, every day. A prime example is the intense argument many in the blogosphere are having with the current president of the United States. I'm not kidding or being a smarty-pants: Whatever his personal beliefs, Obama governs as a centrist and even, in some areas, like a conservative. Therefore, it is no surprise at all that it has been very, very difficult to introduce genuinely liberal ideas into this administration, . . . .

That said, the Obama administration has not heaped the kind of eliminationist scorn on us that [Robert Stacy] McCain and his fellow brown shirt wannabes have. It is with Obama and other Democrats that you will find the discussions you want to have. You may not like what they're doing, but they are not in the grip of a genuinely creepy ideology.

Indeed, most top Democrats adhere to what used to be called "conservatism," including the Clintons, Reid, and of course the even-more-conservative blue dogs. It has been noted, often with amazement, that today's Democrats are to the right of Nixon on many issues; needless to say, that is pretty damn far right.

A governing coalition can be had, between conservatives and progressives, within the Democratic Party and its adherents controlling the Executive and Congress. But, beyond the bounds of that coalition, there be dragons . . .

The Failing Center

Our politics is failing at the center. The focus on the telegenic freak show put on by the extreme Right is distracting us from the reality, that the Center, complacent and corrupt, is failing the country.

The functional task of the elite Center is to resolve conflict into pragmatic choice. The duty to compromise invites contempt from idealists, but a functional center wields the awesome power to marginalize as extremists those, who would attack the legitimacy of the Center's pragmatism and practicality.

A dysfunctional Center cannot exercise its power to marginalize the crazies, or chooses to marginalize people of good will and good sense, instead. A dysfunctional Center cannot manage the intellectual coherence to construct policy compromises that remain functional, creating Frankenstein corpses, instead of possibly ugly, but supremely useful camels*.

That's where the U.S. is at, politically. The elite Center is dominated by people, who are wrong about everything, who have no understanding of what can work, who, in their complacency and corruption, are intent on marginalizing good will and good sense.

Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck are the by-product, not of their audience, but of the corporate executive elite, that cannot, or will not, set any reasonable standard for the conduct of their journalistic enterprise.

The University of California cannot muster the will to fire torture-attorney, John Yoo.

And, health care is suffering the tender mercies of "fiscal conservative" "moderates" for whom only a dysfunctional health reform makes "sense".

*A reference to the insight that a camel is a horse designed by committee.

$30 billion

There's been a lot of attention in the news media devoted to the far-Right extremists and nutcases, upset with health care reform (and the President giving pep talks to young students). Birther, Deathers, and Tenthers.

My concern, though, is that the Center is failing. The antics of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs are symptoms of a failing elite Center -- for one thing, the elite Center, which includes the corporate executives, who head major Media corporations, are unwilling to fire Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck. The University of California will not fire torture lawyer John Yoo, let alone uber-econ-hack Lee Ohanian.

The trick in all politics, as I learned from Stirling Newberry, is to create a coalition of the sane, decent and rational against the crazies. And, key to such an elite coalition is a moderate Center of pragmatists, concerned with what is possible, what works. Barack Obama presents himself as the embodiment of such a Center.

The danger is that such a Center does not hold, that the Center lacks all moral conviction, abandons all intellectual effort for complacency and corruption.

That's what I see looming in the fate of health care reform. Not reform killed outright, by the extremism and nuttiness of the Right, but health care reform killed by the corruption of the Center.

Ezra Klein - What If They Had a Health-Care Reform Bill and Nobody Could Support it?:

"I'm firmly on the record as being willing to support all manner of compromises on health-care reform. Policy dogmatism has not, over the long history of this issue, proven a successful strategy. But there's an increasingly evident path by which health-care reform begins to hurt the very people it's meant to aid. . . . , making health-care reform affordable for the centrists in the Congress could make it unaffordable for the people.

The basic structure of the bill has three main planks working in conjunction with each other: The individual mandate creates a mechanism for a universal, or near-universal, system. A universal, or near-universal, system creates the conditions for insurance market reform. The subsidies make the individual mandate affordable for people to follow.

There are a few ways to destabilize this system. The most likely way is to reduce the subsidies so that the individual mandate isn't really affordable.

The happy news is that the difference between a plan with decent benefits that's affordable for people and a plan that's not affordable for people and doesn't offer decent benefits is not that large. Optimally, you'd want to spend about $1.3 trillion over 10 years. You could probably do it for $900 billion to $1 trillion. But you can't do it for, say, $700 billion, which is a number I'm hearing fairly frequently.

The difference between doing this right and doing this wrong is, in other words, about $30 billion a year, or $300 billion over 10 years. To put that in perspective, many of the legislators who are balking at the cost of health-care reform voted for the Kyl-Lincoln bill to reform the estate tax at a cost of $75 billion a year, or $750 billion over 10 years."

A strange madness

Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com:

"I get spitting, incoherent rage over articles on, um, health care economics or macro modeling. What enrages people so much about these pieces? Usually, it’s impossible to tell — in fact, I often have the sense that the enraged correspondents haven’t read the things at all. But that’s OK — they know that I’m corrupt, a liar, a Nazi, and have been spewing my evil in my writings.

The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.

Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans."

Cable news? Glenn Beck?

Too much television, generally?

Too much change, technological and social?

The Struggle for Realignment

Matthew Yglesias:

". . .in the wake of Barack Obama’s election the main reason to be hopeful about the prospects for universal health care wasn’t so much the election of a new progressive president as the fact that Max Baucus, one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus and also Chairman of the Finance Committee, had essentially adopted the main outline of Hillary Clinton’s universal health care plan.

One natural question to wonder is what happened to this? Does Baucus still think those were good ideas? If he does, I would be eager to see him write them up as legislation and see what kind of support they can garner. Maybe 60 votes aren’t there. But I’d like to see. Nobody can accuse Baucus of being a wild-eyed liberal or a member of the “left of the left.” It seems to me that we’re stuck in a dysfunctional dynamic where you have a powerful centrist senator lay some ideas out (including, for example, a public option), which leads progressives to embrace them as a realistic path to reform, which leads the centrist ideas to be rebranded as left-wing ideas which, in turn, leads to the ideas being abandoned by centrists. Very hard to accomplish anything that way."

There was a lot of speculation after the 2006 Congressional elections gave Democrats control of Congress, whether a political realignment was underway. Earlier, Karl Rove, rather famously, had speculated on whether a realignment akin to that accomplished by McKinley's 1896 election, and the split between the Populists and the Gold Democrats, which ushered in Republican dominance that lasted until 1930, might be accomplished in 2004. If you like the 36-year cycle theory of American politics, then 2004 would have been the year of expected realignment (1788-Founding, 1824-Jackson Democrats, 1860-Lincoln, 1896-Republicans, 1932-FDR, 1968-Nixon); of course, this leaves out 1800-Jeffersonian Republicans; 1828-the year of Jackson's actual election; 1876-the "election" of Rutherford B. Hayes by Election Commission and the End of Reconstruction; 1912-Woodrow Wilson wins, due to the Bull Moose split; 1964-LBJ landslide enacts Civil Rights legislation and War on Poverty, initiates Liberal Social Revolution.

Every election matters, but the search for political realignments also matters. Realignment marks a shift in the composition and habits of the governing coalition, as much or more than the composition of partisan political Party identification, per se.

In 2006 and 2008, propelled by repulsion as much as anything, a small slice of the electorate, and of the political elite, moved from strong identification with, and loyalty to, the Republicans to openness to supporting and working with a moderate Democrat. Partly, it was nostalgia for Clinton, which only a moron like Bush could engender, and partly it was the deft way Barack Obama positioned himself, using every asset of personality and personal identity.

This small slice of moderate/conservatives changed partisan identification and voting habit, but not personal philosophy. The country did not become more liberal. Liberals did not increase in number, although they may have gained a bit of credibility with youth.

"Bi-partisanship" has been the dominant pattern of assembling governing coalitions since WWII. FDR built up the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, under Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller, to oppose the old Main Street reactionary conservatives, under the Taft dynasty. The extreme Right of the Republican Party was excluded from Power, by this form of bipartisanship, which featured moderate Democrats reaching out to moderate Republicans to form "consensus compromises" that just happened to coincide with the needs of the Center.

Gradually, "bi-partisan" shifted under Nixon, who, though personally popular, still led a Party incapable of achieving Congressional majorities. Nixon's particular personal gifts, allowed him to establish "triangulation" as a propaganda tactic, aimed at spliting the moderate from the Democrats within the Democratic Party. Reagan continued the pattern. Conventional and mainstream Republicans continue to dominate their own Party, and to take the lead into forming compromises with, and governing with, the Democrats in Congress.

Things shifted a bit with the Gingrich Revolution and a House majority for the Republicans. A far more extreme brand of reactionary conservative arose, and insisted on dominance within the Republican coalition, and a "take no prisoners" attitude toward the Democrats.

Many Americans still "expect" cooperation between the Parties, a cooperation of good will and common loyalty to the country, which never really existed. But, it simply is not possible.

To govern the Democrats have to form a coalition almost entirely within their own Party.

It's a new pattern, for forming a governing coalition. It remains to be seen how, or if, it will work.

Health care is proving to be an interesting test case, precisely for the reasons the astute Yglesias notes: as long as the centrists have no real principles, and define themselves in contradistinction to the liberals, it will be very hard for centrists and liberals to agree on governance.

Simple Questions, Simple Answers

David S. Broder - Accountability, but at What Cost?: "Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?"

Yes.

Feeling Superior, Feeling Alarmed

Save_the_Rustbelt at Economist's View leaves a comment on something I said there:

Shorter Bruce:

People who aren't like me are stupid.

That is not such a good way to build political momentum for anything.

I suppose blogging, and blog-commenting is essentially a narcissistic activity. Look at me! Here's my opinion!

But, that wasn't the point I was trying to make, when I mourned the state of American democracy, and the dysfunctional stupidity of the politically "independent", middle-of-the-road American public, in a way that provoked rusty's rebuke.

That's not my analysis of what's wrong, at all. It's not about me. I am not expressing this opinion about the grave stupidity of the moderate, centrist Middle of American politics, to feel superior to the ordinary people in "the Middle".

In my view, ordinary people "in the middle" are not natively stupid; they just have other priorities.

For the vast majority of the electorate and population, politics is a question of specialization and trade, like any other economic problem. Most people don't pay as much attention to politics as I do. Most people don't have advanced degrees, or the experience of working in government.

And, they shouldn't have to. They have other things to do with their time. Their jobs, for example. Raising families.

Some people might complain that Americans would get more survey questions right, if the survey was about American Idol, than about health care or Iraq. But, that *should be* OK. People should be able to play golf, do macrame, attend concerts, watch professional wrestling on teevee, without democracy falling apart.

But, functioning democracy is not "free". The People have to be pay *some* attention. Things can be organized to make it easier, quicker. I can buy canned soup and frozen vegetables, to minimize the time spent preparing meals, so that I can do other things with my 24 hours. Whether that "works" well depends delicately on a complex net of specialization, which includes, for example, government regulation of food processing, so that I don't pick up food poisoning from bad practices at some faraway ranch. It actually helps, if there are specialist food critics and teachers to worry about whether there's too much salt in canned soup, or to promote alternatives. There has to be enough competition of the right kind, so that I have choices, when I go to the supermarket. And, it helps, in keeping prices reasonable, if lots of people at the margin actually do know how to cook, and can, say, substitute fresh veggies from the produce section or the farmers' market, if the price of frozen veggies gets out of line.

What used to be called "public opinion" -- the collective views and values of the mostly well-intentioned moderate "Middle" of the electorate -- is vital to the functioning of democracy. But, given that those people have lives and other things to do, they have to conserve the time and attention they devote to forming their opinions and views. Popular political opinion in a democracy in a developed country is a lot like canned soup or frozen vegetables. Possibly nutritious, possibly tasty, but not something one ordinarily spends a lot of time preparing from scratch.

The complex net of specialization and organization, in whatever area of social and economic life, is organic, subject to general entropy and in varying need of repair and reconstruction and tending. Things fall apart. There's a crisis. Repairs are made. Just when frozen TV dinners in an aluminum tray threaten to dominate the culture, Julia Child comes along with a cookbook and a television cooking show. Or, Michael Pollan comes along with a critique of industrial agriculture. Or, Upton Sinclair gets a job in a meatpacking plant. New agencies of government are created, or old ones reformed.

Just as people do learn to cook, even in a world of McDonald's and Campbell's Soup, and that's a good thing, so a fairly massive investment still must be made in political understanding. I think we used to make more of the need for an educated populace, of the value of having people, say, attend college, where they would do more than "major in business" or "pre-med", they would learn something about political economy and culture and science and the larger world.

And, while day-to-day, most people would not have to pay much attention, the demand for attention would vary, with the season and the times.

A lot of what people do to stay minimally informed about political controversy is like canned soup or frozen vegetables. They have informational strategies, that allow them to have opinions, without working very hard at it, just like I have a microwave oven to "prepare" my Green Giant frozen veggies. (Very good, by the way.)

Split-the-difference, middle-of-the-road, both-sides-have-a-point is an informational strategy for conserving intelligence and attention, like a microwave oven, simple, quick and easy.

So, is listening to the pre-processed, canned opinion of a nominally non-partisan journalist, who is specialized in "covering the issues".

The thing is, that the complex, organized net of specialization can break down, and then the individual's strategy goes from being simply economical of time, energy or expense, to being dangerously stupid. This is easy to see with food processing and distribution. If entropy in the organization of industrial food processing methods means that bacteria in a field in California contaminate and poison my frozen veggies, I'm a fool to keep eating them. (I was upset to learn, recently, that frozen pot pies, which I loved as a child, can no longer be made safe to cook at time and temperatures, which leave them still edible; industrial processing is so complex and poorly regulated, that the makers cannot trace and eliminate contamination and the only "safe" alternative is for consumers to overcook them the product to the extent that they are no longer palatable.)

Most people are getting their political opinions from the Media in an easy preparation form, liked canned soup.

I get my political and economic opinions from more boutique sources. Partly, this is a function of my making politics into a hobby, akin to following a sport like baseball. Partly, it is because I'm highly educated in history, politics and economics, and, therefore, can be more discerning and analytical. I depend on Mark Thoma, and Paul Krugman, and Steve Benen and digby and Mark Kleiman and Sterling Newberry and billmon and Arnold Kling and many others to taste-test and prepare sauces and chop celery.

The point of this extended metaphor is that, no, my mournful pessimism about the doleful state of public opinion and democracy in the U.S. is NOT about my feeling morally superior. My understanding is superior -- that's a given; just like Julia Child was a better cook, and better eater, than I am, with my Green Giant.

From my superior perspective, I am shouting: YOU ARE POISONING YOURSELVES! YOU ARE POISONING ALL OF US!

Ordinarily, I would just complain about the quality of the political news Media, in much the way Michael Pollan might criticize agriculture and food processing.

But, at some point, ordinary people have a responsibility, as consumers, to notice that they are being fed poisonous cardboard.

"Obama wasn't born in the U.S." "Health care reform will mean Death Panels for old people!" is pretty obvious poison, I would think. But, we cannot, apparently expect corporate Media to eject Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck from the business of delivering pre-processed political opinion to the masses.

But, the slippery idea that there is some ambiguity about whether the law prohibits torture and murder of captives by CIA agents, is also, to my mind, pretty obvious poison as well. And, we, apparently cannot expect the denizens of Washington Week in Review to acknowledge it.

This isn't about my feeling superior. This is about American democracy dying from ingesting poisonous ideas and not being collectively willing or able to generate enough popular interest or outrage, to reform the system by which political opinion is generated and distributed, consumed and processed into policy, in ordinary times.

These are no longer ordinary times; they cannot be ordinary times, if American democracy is to survive. People are going to have to give up some of their easy methods of forming political opinions for a while, and do a bit more critical thinking. We need more choices in the supermarket of ideas. We need better quality, certified quality if you like.

People like me, who spend more time and attention on politics than is really sensible, have to be the ones, who sound the alarm: American Democracy, you are poisoning yourselves! What you are eating tastes terrible! Pay attention!