Yes, we need to figure out how to talk to disaffected teabagger types, but we really don't have access to them

[Yes, you can click to enlarge.]

"I worry that the Obama election has put the limousine back in American liberalism and has made the Democrats forget the lessons of the Clinton years. At the moment they seem unreconciled to the fact that in democratic societies you go into elections with the nation you have, not the nation you’d wish for."

-- Mark Lilla, in his contribution to "The Historic
Election: Four Views," in the Dec. 9 NYRB

by Ken

The other day I wondered whether, assuming we actually had a coherent progressive message to get out, whether we stood any reasonable chance to get it before the public, given the realities of the media message machines and the money that backs them up. Tonight I want to back up a little and poke around at that message question.

It's because I have such respect for Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia, as a political thinker that I'm kind of torched by the above quote from his contribution to the New York Review of Books's election post mortem. (Note that in the same issue he had a really outstanding piece, "The Beck of Revelation," on Glenn Beck, which we should probably come back to at some point.)

Backing up a bit, Lilla has been paying close attention to the teabaggers, and he doesn't like the way we've been making sport of them.

Republicans take seriously the Tea Party and the quarter or more of the electorate that is sympathetic to it because they see it as a fundamentally right-wing phenomenon. They are wrong. Democrats don’t take it seriously -- by which I mean, don’t try to understand and engage the passions behind it -- for the very same reason. They, too, are wrong. The Democratic doxa for the past few years has been a mix of contempt (look at the misspelled signs Glenn Beck’s puppets are holding!) and economic determinism (these sorts of things happen when people lose their jobs and homes).

President Obama is no snob but he is susceptible to the latter delusion, telling Jon Stewart recently that when he saw the real economic figures provided by the Bush administration during the transition, and discovered just how bad things were, his political advisers told him to prepare to lose the midterm elections. Sage advice, though it does not follow from the fact that a stagnant economy spelled a Democratic defeat, that all the factors contributing to the defeat are a function of economics. The Tea Party is not.

Nor is it a simple right-wing phenomenon. Though those most active in the movement lean fairly right by most measures, its sympathizers among independents are a mixed lot.

Now what he's saying here isn't much different from what David Sirota was telling us, long before there was a tea party, in his book The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, in which he offered field reports on a whole range of individuals and groups, from all over the country and all over the political, social, and economic spectrums, who were -- to put words in his (and their) mouth -- mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

On Amazon.com there's an unfavorable comment on The Uprising from March 2009 by "Alan Elsner, author," which includes this:

Sirota contends that millions of Americans are full of rage at an economic system that is blatantly unjust, delivering the vast bulk of its rewards to a few at the top. So far, I'm with him -- and I give him credit because he appears to have seen this anger building much earlier than most other analysts. But he then takes his argument a step further. This anger, though unfocused, disconnected and atomized, has laid the groundwork for a new radical political reform movement that will produce fundamental change -- an uprising.

Now perhaps I should go back and reread the book, but my pretty clear recollection is that this last part is exactly what Sirota does not say. My recollection is that he could hardly be more explicit that these numerous pockets of rebellion are not and probably never could be a single uprising -- these people are all rising up, but not rising up together. The point, though, is that there are all sorts of overlaps among the various groups' grievances, and there's an opening there for some sort of unapologetically populist movement that could begin to find areas of common ground among various combinations of them.

And indeed all through the 2008 presidential sweepstakes Sirota hammered away at the populist political opening, expressing all manner of frustration that the only candidates who were exploring it were on the Republican side (Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul). Author Elsner managed to miss this writing in March 2009, and came up with this doozy of a prophecy:

Sirota travels around the country, visiting different outposts of the "uprising" -- but fails to make his arguments stick. More likely, the rage will cool as soon as the economy begins to recover and things will continue much as before. There is no uprising and there will not be one.

Since Author Elsner doesn't seem to know what Sirota's arguments are, it's not surprising that those arguments couldn't divert him from this bit unfortunate prediction.

Of course there didn't necessarily have to be the kind of uprising, or uprisings, we've seen since March 2009. President Obama had it in his power to steer the country in a very different direction, which might well have made inroads into the ranks of the people who have such a strong feeling that their government has become at best irrelevant and at worst inimical to their well-being. But the people who were listening closely to candidate Obama, and saw what they'd heard in the campaign reflected in the princelings of the oligarchy he appointed to most of the significant posts in his administration, weren't at all surprised that his sympathies and actual view turned out to be much closer to those of Republicans than to those of much of the Democratic base. We knew that the new president faced humongous challenges, what with an economic meltdown, two wars, and an executive branch that had been systematically corroded and poisoned by the Bush regime. But who knew that the new president was going to be this ineffectual and, even more surprisingly, this inarticulate? We thought, after all, that his communication skills would be a prime asset. Of course to take advantage of communication skills you have to have something people want to have communicated to them.

"The Tea Party’s rhetoric," Lilla writes,

expresses many contradictory things, but it is continuous with a forty-year trend of growing dissatisfaction with the political process, distrust of elected officials, skepticism about the effectiveness of government initiatives, worry about frayed social bonds, and the conviction that self-interested elites are running the show. Every president since Jimmy Carter has faced this nest of sentiments and the passions they provoke; only the Republicans have managed to exploit it, and since Ronald Reagan not all that effectively.

And there doesn't seem to me to be anything here to quarrel with. But then he continues:

The one Democrat to get it, at least in his 2.0 version, was Bill Clinton. He took the lesson from the defeat of his health care initiative and the thumping he took in midterm elections and changed course. Most importantly, he managed to get a Democratic version of welfare reform passed, which symbolically was very important for independent voters.

This then is followed by the quote at the top of this post, about putting the limousine back in American liberalism.

Here I have to part company. Bill Clinton at his triangulatingly most craven is a model for what liberals, or progressives, or anybody who cares about the well-being of Americans generally, to emulate? The welfare-reform bill that he signed is a model for action now? Whether as policy or symbolism, it sucked.

I guess Lilla and I have a serious disagreement over this bit of conventional Village wisdom:

what we saw in Tuesday’s election was a large-scale shift of independents, many of whom must have voted for Barack Obama in 2008. As David Chalian observed on NewsHour:

In 2006, when Democrats swept into control of the House, independents split 57 percent for Democrats…39 percent for Republicans. 2010, the exact flip—56 percent of independents went to Republicans; 38 percent went to Democrats. That right there is the biggest story of the election.

Well, no, not if you're assuming that the same voters, not to be confused with the same percentages, flipped D to R. Some did, no doubt. But to a large extent, it wasn't the same independents in the D column in 2008 and the R column in 2010. An awful lot of the "D independents" from 2008 stayed home in 2010, and "R independents" who hadn't shown up in 2008 returned to the polls in 2010.

Could the Democrats do worse, from the standpoint of either policy or politics, than to emulate Bill the Triangulator? The Republicans who screamed bloody murder after the 1994 Democratic electoral debacle that Clinton was basically stealing their ideas were for the most part correct. It worked for him in the short term, but laid the groundwork for the disasters of the Bush presidency. And the Republican ideas available for stealing now are orders of magnitude more horrendous now.

I'm sorry Lilla is offended by our making fun of the ignorance and delusion that the teabaggers so frequently display, and display in such an ugly, threatening, saying-fuck-you-to-reason way. The fact is, I think liberals care a lot more about their plight than any other segment of the political culture. It's the "radical centrists," the New Democrats and Third Way-ists and the like, who pander to them with such contempt.

The problem is, how do we reach them?

Lilla does have some thoughts.

hat’s particularly frustrating for someone who’s been watching the Tea Party lately is the inability of Democrats, and especially our President, to capitalize on issues where they actually have an advantage over Republicans, especially economic fairness. Many key words of our political vocabulary have been copyrighted by Republicans over the past thirty years, notably “freedom,” which was the major leitmotif of Reagan’s administrations and the label he stuck on all his foreign and domestic policies. The symbolically loaded terms that mobilized voters for the Democrats in the Sixties and Seventies—”equality” and “justice”—now drive them away; unfortunate but true.

But there is still one powerful symbol the Democrats could capture because today’s Republicans explicitly reject it: fairness. “Life isn’t fair” is a refrain you hear constantly from the right. Yet there is a strong sense in the nation today that things are rigged, especially at the top of the economic ladder, and this has only intensified since the bailouts of early 2009. The unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage in economic populism in this intensely populist age, when skepticism of “Wall Street” just keeps rising, is utterly baffling to me. This is the one area where they could get a toehold, if not with the Tea Party hardcore then with the vast numbers of independents who sympathize with it and have floated back to the Republican Party because of it.

I saw in The New York Times the day after the election a survey of election-day voters that touches on this and doesn’t surprise me in the least. Most responses show just how divided the nation is, except on one question: Wall Street. When asked whom they most blame for our economic troubles, 41 percent of those who voted Republican blamed Obama and 55 percent of those who voted Democrat blamed Bush. But 32 percent of Democratic voters also listed Wall Street, as did—find a seat, quick—37 percent of Republican voters. At the crucial moment last year when AIG was bailed out and bonuses were paid, President Obama let pass a golden opportunity to seize the issue of economic fairness and steal some of the right’s populist thunder. Whatever political instinct it is that tells a politician he’s got an opening, that a potent political symbol is lying there waiting to be picked up, our president lacks it. As for progressive pundits and Democratic Party leaders, they need to get out of their limousines and talk to some of those people with the misspelled signs. They’ll discover some potential allies among them.

This last part is patronizing, ill-informed bullshit. First off, we know that the president passed on that opening to thump for "economic fairness" not because of political ineptitude but because he doesn't believe in it. It appears there are no circumstances under which he would consider taking the people's side over Wall Street's. I'm not aware of anything he believes in more fervently than protecting the prerogatives of megacorporate interests. The health care fake-reform package is the pile of crap it is for this reason, and the so-called "energy" package he put together was if anything more hopelessly compromised.

Still, this is an interesting idea, a campaign for economic fairness, even if our president isn't going to be the one to wage it. I really don't get the feeling, though, that Lilla has any better idea than the rest of us how to actually reach the teabaggers. Yes, there should be many potential allies among them, but I don't see much recognition of the barriers to communication they have raised and enforced. The people who swallowed, and still swallow, lies like the "death panels" nonsense, who let swallow monumental lies whole and demand more, are not going to suddenly turn around at mention of economic fairness.

That said, I'm not sure we're as bereft of message power as the resulting void would seem to suggest. As a matter of fact, some remarkable work has been done by people like George Lakoff and especially Drew Westen, as Howie's friend Danny Goldberg pointed out in the Nation piece from which Howie quoted the other day. During the health care battle, both Westen and former Labor Secretary Bob Reich provided excellent advice on the shaping and messaging of real reform, which might have resonated with Americans who felt the debate was taking place above their heads and out of their control.

As Howie pointed out earlier today, Reich has produced a remarkable, and remarkably simple, description of how the administration's economic messaging has gone wrong: by failing to make the case against the economic predators who've gotten a chokehold on the economy, the White House economic messagers have had the effect of reinforcing the Republican message that the fault is Big Government. (If you didn't read it, you really should.)

Again, the obvious problem is that this administration can't deliver that message because it doesn't believe in that message. There's a deeper problem, though. Even if you had a pol who wanted to deliver that message, who wanted, say, to exhort Americans to rally for "economic fairness," there are humongously powerful forces out there who don't want such a message spread. There are the corporate interests who are prospering under the status quo, which is such a mess for so many of us. And of course there are their allies throughout government and the media. If they didn't already know which side their bread is buttered on, there's now a virtually unlimited supply of money to "persuade" them.

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