I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!
E.J. Dionne, Jr. impersonates Stuart Smalley in a little peptalk to progressives. Now is the time for victory (cue up the “Right here, Right now” for background motivational soundtrack). The left could very well win big in November 2008 –after all, Britons jettisoned Churchill immediately after the war for no clear reason. Here are some of the roadsigns pointing to what Dionne claims will lead to a liberal advantage in popular politics:
Even before support for Bush’s Iraq policies collapsed and even before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, three other controversies weakened the foundations of his presidency — and of the conservative cause.
First, Bush’s decision to push for the partial privatization of Social Security was a choice rooted in ideology that called forth a vigorous defense of social insurance. The more Bush discussed that boutique idea, inspired by conservative think tanks, the less the public liked it. Bush was proposing to weaken guaranteed pensions at a moment when many Americans were experiencing new levels of economic insecurity described by the Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker in The Great Risk Shift (Oxford University Press, 2006). Hacker notes that more and more financial risk has been thrown onto individual Americans as collective safety nets, particularly those provided by private employers for pensions and health care, have been shredded. On May 16, 2005, BusinessWeek, hardly a socialist bastion, sought to explain, as the headline put it, “Why so many Americans aren’t buying into Bush’s Ownership Society.” It turned out that one of the liberal-left’s oldest commitments, to a certain degree of social provision, was both up-to-date and popular in an increasingly uncertain economic time.
The notion of subsidizing your own Social Security benefits wasn’t fundamentally a terrible idea. It had some unknowns, and maybe some flaws. But mainly it had some promise. It offered a phased approach to providing solvency for a program that bean counters of every persuasion concede needs immediate attention. The loudest voices against the proposal were not those concerned about losing the full impact of their benefits, but those concerned with how to pay for it without raising taxes. The absence of a negotiated solution (the national debate lasted just a few months) did not vindicate any established liberal tenets of guaranteed income, as Dionne would like us to believe. It only underscored the difficulty of sustaining such welfare at the current levels. Hardly a repudiation of a creative idea.
And, thinking back, Bush handed potential Democratic compromisers a possibility of a tax increase to cover the transition–and they didn’t bite. Perhaps they were punting the idea forward to a future political season, when they might be blowing the fiduciary whistle. Today, Democrats talk a mean game about a imagined lack of personal sacrifice by the public during wartime, but they sure as hell didn’t budge on assuming a little extra personal sacrifice to save the largest social program in American history.
Second, the decision of the president and a Republican Congress to use federal power to overrule a state-court decision allowing the death of Terri Schiavo, who was deemed brain-dead, was far more damaging than it seemed at the time. Even social moderates and conservatives were uneasy with heavy-handed federal intervention in a matter that seemed more properly handled within families and by state governments. Even opponents of physician-assisted suicide did not view the case as clear-cut. They sensed that the moralistic language used by conservative politicians was inspired not by deep conviction but by the frantic pursuit of a key constituency’s votes.
Perhaps liberals might have been watching in disgust as the unusual events in Congress unfolded, but the rest of the country knew they were witnessing a slow-motion euthanasia sanctioned by courts overriding a state government acting at the family’s behest. (emphasis Dionne’s) On what basis does Dionne possibly mean the “moralistic language used by conservative politicians” was not “inspired by deep conviction”? One either supports the prolonged starvation of a brain-dead woman or doesn’t. So what if conservatives (and the 47 Democrats that voted with them in the Palm Sunday Compromise) made a private bill effort to intervene and go on the record as supporting the family of this young woman in this complicated case?
Pandering? C’mon. It’s not like they were calling for voting rights for felons and illegal immigrants.
Last was the controversy over leaking the name of Valerie Plame, the CIA operative married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The case came to symbolize the administration’s approach to its critics on Iraq. At the very moment when doubts about the war were building, here was an incident that seemed to embody all that was wrong with the administration’s approach to selling a war that, initially at least, a majority of Americans did not consider either wise or necessary.
Only in the inside-the-beltway world of liberal narrative writers would this case mean what Dionne says it means. In retrospect, the facts now available to us (courtesy of the Libby trial) indicate that the episode can be better summarized as a careless foray in media madness by a not-so-neocon State Department executive zapping a Kerry partisan who penned a critique that was, incidentally, largely discredited in an offical forum. The egg is on who’s face here?
I list these problems not because I believe that liberals face an impossible situation, but precisely because I am hopeful about the prospects of a progressive renewal. Its success will require the left to face its contradictions honestly, explain its principles clearly, and offer solutions fearlessly.
I’m not so sure voters will be keen on underwriting the kind of progressive renewal Dionne is hoping for, but a lot can happen between now and next fall.
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