Kevin Baker uses unnecessarily baroque interpretations of the motives of “liberal” political actors. In my experience, based on attending three Democratic Party meetings a week for more than ten years, the role of the Democratic Party in American politics is to offer token resistance to the corporations and the rich and then to roll over. The sports analogy is not to beanbag or Little League but rather to TV wrasslin’ or the 1919 World Series. The people at the top of the Democratic Party are furthering their class interests by weakly making the case for liberal reform and then throwing the game.
This paradigm of American politics was best articulated by Harper’s Magazine’s own Walter Karp in Indispensable Enemies. Karp divided the political world into two kinds of people: “hacks” (self-interested careerists) and morally driven “reformers.” The hacks of both parties collude to keep the reformers out.
In the Sixties and earlier eras, the reformers forced concessions from the hacks. These reforms were then taken back under such hacks as Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and, sorry to say, Obama. Obama ran as a reformer, of course, but has governed as a hack. If he were a real reformer, we would have single-payer health care.
Bo Richardson
Bellingham, Wash.
That letter was in response to Kevin Baker's The vanishing of the liberal: How the left learned to be helpless. The essay becomes a history lesson on the ground liberals have ceded since the New Deal by not defending the government's role in the country's affairs. It is an indictment on the lack of party leadership in advancing core Democratic principles. At least stated principles.
My favorite passage of Baker's essay is aimed square at the Technocrat-in-chief Obama and his party of corporatist lackies.
Obama is an adroit politician and, like the last adroit Democratic president, he may be able to secure another term in the White House. Perhaps he will even be able to keep a Democratic majority in Congress, though this now seems unlikelier by the day. But to treat this as a triumph of activism is to say that a prisoner retains free will because he is able to stay in his cell. Obama, the congressional Democrats, and most of our politicians at every level now maneuver within political confines defined by financial and military interests they cannot conceive of challenging. Perversely, our ruling elite today is one of unparalleled diversity, and includes unprecedented numbers of women, minorities, and individuals who have worked their way up to power on brains and determination alone, usually without having inherited connections or wealth. It is a meritocracy much like the one long envisioned by many liberal reformers—and it has decided to capitulate, reap its considerable rewards, and draw the ladder up after it.
Who will challenge this shining fortress upon a hill? The right-wing pseudo-Populists who have devoured the Republican Party may win some victories in the short run. But the Tea Party and its fellow travelers have already become a jointly owned subsidiary of News Corp. and the likes of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks lobby. (To understand just how fraudulent the movement is, one need only look at the $549-a-seat price tag for tickets to its first convention, and the $100,000 speaker’s fee paid to Sarah Palin. So much for box socials and sing-alongs.) Right-wing Populism is anyway inherently contradictory, a demand that the state recede to a size that will leave its citizens utterly defenseless against the gigantic forces at loose in the world today. No one is going to abolish the Federal Reserve, or the income tax, or Social Security and Medicare; if they did, small businesses and working people would be trampled beneath the corporate entities bent on their exploitation. The counter-Populism of the right is the prisoner’s last, despairing option, to move from learned helplessness to suicide.
Coming to power when he did, with the political skills and the majorities he possesses, Barack Obama squandered an almost unprecedented opportunity. But it is increasingly clear that he never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations are, once more, people, American democracy has snapped shut again—the great, forced opening of the past 130 years has ended. There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.
The ruling class has failed us time and time again. And to quote a famous politician's now-empty campaign slogan, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Yes Mr. Obama, ironically, we are.
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