EDIT: Addendum added at bottom.
The fellas at Open Left have dutifully responded to my delineation between "rational" and "radical" progressivism and attendant critique of the latter. David Sirota has issued a characteristically self-aggrandizing response; I am going to start instead with Paul Rosenberg's reply, which is less personal and more thoughtful.
1. Let's not say "progressive" when we mean "populist"
Paul links to a terrific article by Jack Balkin about the difference between "populism" and "progressivism" in the American historical context. I wish I had seen Balkin's article before composing my own, because it comes very close to encompassing the distinction that I was hoping to make, and does so with better historical grounding. In Balkin's terminology, "populism" equates to what I called "radical progressivism", and "progressivism" equates to what I called "rational progressivism".
What I don't get, however, is why Paul, being acutely aware of this, tends to use the terms "populism" and "progressivism" interchangeably. David Sirota does this too; in fact he frequently takes things a step further, speaking not just as a "progressive" but often deigning to speak on behalf of progressives.
2. Populism is a means or a mode, but not an end.
By "means" I refer to a "theory of change", by "mode" I refer to something close to a style or even a brand. These definitions are of course complementary, although there are some politicians (Barack Obama probably among them) who borrow from the populist brand without really endorsing its mechanisms.
What populism is not, however, is a cogent political philosophy unto itself. Politicians including Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, John Edwards, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Hugo Chavez, Bob La Follette, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich, George Wallace, Boris Yeltsin, Mike Huckabee, Joseph Stalin, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader can all be accredited with adopting populist framings to some degree or another -- obviously they would not agree on very much in terms of the desired outcomes of their endeavors. Just as obviously, populism has been marshaled as a force for both tremendous good and tremendous evil at various points in history. In Europe, which has had more first-hand experience with the latter, "populism" tends to have a pejorative meaning; we have a more neutral impression of it in the Americas.
Hence, we need a better understanding of what Sirota's goals are.
3. In Sirota's case, the immediate-term goal appears to be the dissolution of corporate power.
We can say this comfortably because Sirota says the same thing himself; defining populism as "challenging corporate economic power". Sirota also frequently critiques government elites, but usually only to the extent that they are complicit in entrenching corporate power. This is all good enough and well enough; corporations are not very popular these days and lately they have done a lot of stupid and awful things. Notice, however, that Sirota does not place any modifier (such as "corrupt") next to "corporate economic power". He appears to regard corporate economic power as intrinsically evil. There aren't a lot of shades of gray; there isn't a lot of distinction between Exxon and Apple, between MBNA and Starbucks.
4. A world dissolute of corporate power implies one of two things: state socialism or social anarchism.
When I suggest that Sirota's modes of thought are Marxist, I don't mean that figuratively. I mean that literally: the logical conclusion to his project is some version of a workers' state. If there were more nuance in Sirota's thinking, I might guess differently at his desired outcome (for example, European-style social democracy). But there isn't -- he exists in a world of Good Things and Bad Things and Capital Letters -- and so I don't.
Take, for instance, Sirota's oft-voiced disdain for Clintonism and neo-liberal economics. If your concern is for the economic well-being of the working class, than attacking Clinton is a strange place to start. Under his presidency, real household incomes for the bottom 10th percentile -- a pretty good Rawlsian metric for economic well-being -- increased by 17.3 percent, the largest increase of any president since the Census Bureau began compiling numbers (.pdf) on this statistic.
One can certainly raise various critiques of Clinton's presidency, many of which I'd wholeheartedly agree with, but in broad strokes his economic program would seem to have been a tremendous success, particularly for the working poor. (Although the wealthy certianly also fared well under his presidency; growth in income was remarkably evenly distributed between all income classes under Clinton).
5. The political goals of Sirota, if enacted, might be acutely harmful to the working class.
And this is what ultimately bothers me about Sirota. Compare the experience of the working class under Bill Clinton to that of the Soviet Union, which had infant mortality rates about three times that of the United States, significantly shorter life expectancies, extremely high rates of alcoholism ... life was not good. Not that I'll have to spend much time convincing you about most of this.
To be fair, I don't know that David would literally endorse a Soviet-style economic order over Clintonism ... but given the lack of restraint and qualification that he tends to place on his opinions, he should think more carefully about where his conclusions lead. In the real world, we need to recognize that corporations contribute to the economic well-being of the working class as well as detract from it; that neither unbridled laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism are anything approaching acceptable solutions, and that the trick is finding the optimum amount of regulation.
6. More broadly, populist movements may not always benefit their participants.
And to bring things full circle, one of the ironies of populist movements is that they do not always work out well for the people whom they purport to enlist in their cause. Take the What's the Matter With Kansas? argument: Was Ronald Reagan a good president for the working poor? No, but in 1984, about 60 percent of non-college graduates voted for him. This duality is more obvious in some of the European-based examples. Perhaps there are organic strains of populism that are truly self-generating, but there are also synthetic versions that consist of elites manipulating popular opinion on their behalves and wielding it as their chalice, sometimes to disastrous effect.
___
Addendum: You know what, this has obviously gotten a little carried away. The problem with Sirota is that his arguments are self-righteous, accusatory, and oversimplistic. Here, we generally aim for nuance and poise. To the extent that this post has not reflected that spirit, my apologies. I'm going to make one last substantive observation about the Clinton economic record in a separate post ... and then we're done with this.
2.16.2009
Sound and Fury, Signifying -- What, Exactly?
@ 10:47 PM
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Great article, from someone on the rational progressive side. I'd like to see something about the problems with universal healthcare and why the idea that it would be easy to enact and immediately beneficial were it not for vested interests is wrong.
And, First?
And this is what ultimately bothers me about Sirota. Compare the experience of the working class under Bill Clinton to that of the Soviet Union...
Wow, this all just keeps getting better.
Normally I'm used to there really being content here worth engaging or considering; this is just an empty, ill-considered blogfight between a couple of people making bad echoes of arguments.
There is more on populism from a Marxist point of view in a dispute between two hoity-toity European political philosophers, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek.
Laclau adopts a post-Marxist position in his book "On Populist Reason" to argue that a broad-based left that does not reduce its politics to one based on class reductionism must organize (following Schmitt, in one critic has called 'left Schmittianism') around a common "enemy" - he proposes corporations and capitalist elites. This common enemy becomes the glue that holds an otherwise disparate movement together. This is a species of class struggle without a class.
Zizek objects for the reasons that you object: populism is a style and it is subspecies of the paranoid style. Elevating the "enemy" as an organizing principle to a theoretical principle risks relapse into, in Zizek's opinion, some seriously scary shit, including but not limited to neo-fascism or a "left" fascism (Stalin, Austrian Christian Social Party of the late 19th century that combiend a critique of capitalism with virulent anti-semitism). Marxism, Zizek argues, should not be about an enemy. Capitalists act the way they do because that is the logic of the system, not some individual moral failing. Their position within the structural logic of the capitalist system dictates their behavior. Greed, in short, is a required good of capitalism, not an inherent moral failing of an individual. Marxism combats the system; populism combats individuals, or groups of individuals. As such, it can quickly get ugly.
You can follow part of the debate here:
http://www.lacan.com/zizpopulism.htm
I don't necessarily support either Laclau or Zizek's arguments, but it is an interesting take on the issue.
I always thought that populists believed in things like the Gold Standard, Free Silver, Trust Busting and acted like William Jennings Bryan. That they were in fact great public orators with tendencies towards Fascism, demagoguery and inciting class-warfare with the "I am everyman" crap. Snake-oil salesmen running for President/Supreme Soviet/Il Duce.
"Hey, let's tear down the house of some rich people because rich people MUST BE, BY DEFINITION, evil" line of thinking. Again, from what I can read, labelling someone else a populist is a slander.
What say we use some of the ideas in the past that worked and adapt them, as necessary, with new technology instead of revisting names we can call each other?
Nate, I have to say, I was a little skeptical when you started dipping your toes in the political philosophy pond. But the more you say about it, the more well-reasoned your distinctions sound. Nice job.
"In the real world, we need to recognize that corporations contribute to the economic well-being of the working class as well as detract from it; that neither unbridled laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism are anything approaching acceptable solutions, and that the trick is finding the optimum amount of regulation."
I would agree wholeheartedly. Marxism/Communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, just ask the Chinese. Now, this isn't to say that the rich in this country shouldn't pay more in taxes than they do now, (they definitely should) or that we don't need a better safety net of programs to assist the poor. (we do) What we should do is focus on creating a free market system that serves the people, rather than the elite. However, throwing out all capitalism would, as Nate mentioned, do tremendous harm to the working class.
Silver and Sirota are both over their heads on economics. I'm happy to let Paul Krugman and James Galbraith (who I both admire) fight each other without any cheering from the sidelines.
Also, the HEALTH CARE thread was up alone for how long? Five hours? We have five hours to discuss Health Care before we have a new topic to discuss. I am feeling a little verklempt here, talk amongst yourselves, "Who is David Sirota and why does he suck?"
We should spend twice that time talking about a moron like John McCain and the ravings of the LOSER of the election than we should talking about which label to apply to someone that is CLOSER to (most of) us politically.
I am looking over the most recent article for a third time to find anything worthy of commentary. More health care talk, please. I will take strategy, graphs, charts, predictions, anything over this infighting.
Regards
Nate, dude, you are taking Sirota way too seriously (almost as seriously as he takes himself). He's just a lefty provocateur and rabblerouser, kinda like Michael Moore, but with intellectual pretensions and not as funny.
As someone who has railed against corporate economic power. I think this is a little one sided. I am not familiar with Siroda, but I do think that the way the corporation has been interpreted by the courts creates an environment where it is acceptable to exploit the corporation's workers, the communities in which it operates, those who buy said corp's products or services, and the nation as a whole. As long as the court's believe that the corporation's sole consideration must be its shareholders things like the Savings and Loan fiasco, Enron and the current mortgage meltdown will continue to happen, just in a new form every few years. Regulation helps, but only until a way is figured around it or a new loophole is introduced in congress. The only was to end they cycle is to create a new definition of the corporation that is more attuned to the needs of the community it should be serving.
However, throwing the baby out with the bathwater is always ill advised.
/End rant.
By the way, I find this whole series of posts kind of ridiculous. Why get in a pissing match over what type of progressive people are? The pissing match with RCP during the election regarding which polls they included was a legitimate process dispute. This just seems petty and circular firing squad action to me. We should be saving our fire for Republicans (not all just the ick ones like Boehner).
Let's just get one thing straight BEFORE we get people in here claiming that they're for Communism or that they're Marxist:
Marxists should presently be libertarian. They want capitalism to go fourth and hose the prolitariat until such time as conciousness is developed and they rise up. Real Marxists don't give a damn about present conditions.
Talk all you want about how it's failed or how it's succeeded. It's never been done. You're not talking about the real thing. Hugo Chavez is a Populist Regional Fascist. Not a Socialist. Not a Communist. Word for past regimes.
If you're going to do this, try calling a spade a spade, don't go by the titles they give/gave themselves.
...he exists in a world of Good Things and Bad Things and Capital Letters
Ding. Like George W. Bush, this is not a guy who does nuance, or is prone to self-doubt.
About the best one could say of Sirota is that he's really more interested in the fight itself than the resolution, and that usually he's on the good side of the fight. The problem is that he purports to know what he's talking about when he doesn't, and he's always straining to make the perfect (as he sees it) the enemy of the attainable.
*"Word"="ditto"="same thing goes". Sorry for going to the colloquial.
Nate - I have to thank you for this cogent argument. I feel weirdly - I'd much rather no name have been given to my political inclinations, but you've done it. :( I also wish I was able to read David Sirota's rebuttals, but he takes everything so personally that he goes off the deep-end, making anyone who doesn't agree with him the enemy. I've grown mostly distrustful of David - when I like his posts, I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Well, anyway, I'll follow along as best as I can, but for now, just want to thank you for your contribution to sorting out the mess and clash at OpenLeft. I think it is fair to say that the emerging group of Obamacrats (to quote Lee Stranahan) are more in the "rational progressive" mode.
Two other quick points:
I think Nate is fundamentally wrong about there being a strong "Marxist" influence in radical progressive movements in the US. Perhaps there once was, in the 1960's, but the main failing of the progressive movement in the US has always been its normative language, its moralizing political tactics that is the mirror image of the Christian right in its argument that politics is a species of morality play. Certain American analysts adopted Marxian social analysis (C. Wright Mill comes to mind immediately) but as a broad-based politics, organized Marxism doesn't exist in the US, and Marxist social analysis doesn't exist anywhere except in the universities. The American progressive movement's essential organizing fallacy in my mind is that isn't Marxist (i.e. dependent on rational argument) enough.
On ethics: actually, following Nate's dichotomous model, it would be the reform progressives who hew to a more Kantian ethical universe, in their acceptance of the given and their circumscription of the realm of the possible. This dovetails perfectly with a reformist mindset. Radical progressives follow more closely (or should) a Hegelian ethics (if such a thing could truly be said to exist) in that the argue that the fundamental political project is to rethink the 'whole' (i.e. the entire system of society) and change it.
Apologies, I'm rereading Marcuse for my dissertation.
"Marxists should presently be libertarian. They want capitalism to go fourth and hose the prolitariat until such time as conciousness is developed and they rise up. Real Marxists don't give a damn about present conditions."
This would only be an accurate portrait of Marxist social theory if you stopped paying attention to it in 1890.
As pertains to most Marx-inspired social theory after that date, this is a total caricature and I can only suspect that you've run into too many CTGs - Communist til Graduation.
For two good contemporary Marxist analyses of our current situation, may I suggest Giovanni Arrighi's "Long Twentieth Century " and "Adam Smith in Beijing" as well as anything written by David Harvey.
A couple of points. First, IMO, this argument - at least in the context of corporations - boils down to "How much should we regulate?"
Nate claims Sirota wants complete and total regulation, and not having followed DS writings I can't vouche for NS's accuracy there. All I can say for sure is that if you're gonna interpret your point 3 to be Sirota wanting *complete* dissolution, you're going to need to cite more proof than you have thus far. Broad Generalizations for $1000, Alex.
My opinion on the matter is that the last 8yrs have seen ZERO regulation, and while Clinton's economic record wrt jobs is solid, ultimately his lax regulatory philosophy contributed to the problems we're facing today. Ergo, we need more regulation than during the Clinton years.
Does that make me Marxist? Of course not: it makes me "more regulation than Clinton"ist. I'm a long way from Marxist.
Second, if Democrats would actually govern with the efficiency they show in forming the circular firing squad the country might not be in the mess it's in.
Stop the petty Debate 101 b.s. please. You're both above this.
A:
The only thing that got Marx to change his mind was at the end of his life, the Russian revolution provided him with a little hope that he might see a prolitariat revolution in his lifetime.
I think you're refering to Structuralist theory, which is basically an academic way to point out how things are unfair for certain groups. David Harvey is a great guy, but he is really just a guy that points out structural problems instead of creating answers.
Yes, there is merit to this and books like Neoliberalism are genius. But it's hardly Marxist.
And yes. WAY too many CTGs.
Well, there actually was an American Populist Movement in the late nineteenth century and there actually was a Progressive Movement in the early 29th. These movements were two different phenomena, with substantially different goals...different tactics... ...different classes...different sensibilities.
These words are being tossed around in the today's post without any historical grounding, as colloquial expressions that means whatever you choose to make them mean...and the semantic dice have been completely loaded.
This issue dividing liberals and radicalism in our nation's historical experience has always been capitalism--to what degree it should be regulated or nationalized.
Suffice it to say, while we continue to argue, almost all Western democracies have a system more mixed than ours.
Lastly:I have found the statistical analyses on 358 very useful and reliable. While I don't rely on this site to get my political philosophy tuned up, I have appreciated how Nate has tried to teach us all something about math and has helped to make statistics more accessible--at least to me.
it is somewhat disturbing that some of the bloggers yesterday seemed to relate to Nate as some kind of Internet guru who must be supported out of faith, loyalty, and/or adulation. Come on "rational progressives," think for yourselves. Isn't that your strong suit?
I'm not sure how Marx could have witnessed the Russian Revolution: he died in 1883 and the Revolution did not start until 1917. Do you mean perhaps the Paris Commune (1870-1), about which he wrote a book oft-cited by Marxist political theorists?
Structuralist theory isn't really about that. Structuralism is Levi-Strauss, Barthes, early Foucault, Lacan; it is concerned with extending the theories of structural linguistics to the social world. In many ways it was anti-Marxist, though Althusser attempted to reread Marx using structuralist methods.
Harvey is very much a Marxist. He calls himself one. He teaches a seminar on Capital every year at CUNY. He writes for Marxist journals and attends Marxist conferences. He is a Marxist.
If he doesn't seem one, it is only because Marx's critique of capitalism has totally permeated most thinking about economics. Almost all macroeconomic theory is, in one way or another, a descendant of Marx's thinking. Endorsing his conclusions for political action is a different story.
I also think Harvey has made some suggestions. He has argued for, among other things, reclassifying the legal status of corporations; autogestion (worker self-management and ownership of enterprise); and a basic guaranteed income.
Not trying to quibble - I'm an historian so I'm picky about this stuff.
I knew a lot of CTGs too.
Nate:
Au Contraire, Populism is indeed a cogent political philosophy. It simply doesn't fit into the particular two-party system that developed in the USA after the Civil War and that has persisted since.
Populism is radical left on political economy, reactionary right on social and cultural norms, and isolationist on foreign affairs.
Authentic Populists really have nowhere to go in our institutionalized political structure, although when they find themselves completely shut out they usually erupt in a short-lived Third Party with an aspect of personality cult: William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Ross Perot.
When they aren't shut out, they put themselves in the bosom of one of the two major parties by prioritizing the three aspects listed above, picking the aspects that are most salient at the time, and, again, latching onto a personality--hence, the Sarah Palin phenomena.
I can't claim to be familiar with Sirota's work, but it seems that the discussion of "rational progressivism" has spawned some horribly irrational argumentation. I think the problem is in this:
"If there were more nuance in Sirota's thinking, I might guess differently at his desired outcome (for example, European-style social democracy). But there isn't -- he exists in a world of Good Things and Bad Things and Capital Letters -- and so I don't."
Sacrificing one's own nuance in response to an unsophisticated opponent will inevitably result in a dialogue where nobody is saying a damned thing worth hearing, and victory will go to the one more skilled in wielding the irrational.
Obvious points:
-A dichotomy between Corporate Power and Social Anarchism, with no intermediate steps or analysis, is false on its face.
-Sirota's attack on Clinton and neo-liberalism is probably based on something other than the change in household income for the bottom 10%. While I am unfamiliar with his work, that uses a remarkably overbroad argument to address another argument that isn't even explicated. The percentages cited are, furthermore, not inconsistent with an overall increase in economic disparity, which I'm sure another might cite in contrast.
-"Compare the experience of the working class under Bill Clinton to that of the Soviet Union" is so hyperbolic as to be downright insane.
*
Sirota and Rosenberg are a frekin joke.
I find this discussion a little muddled snce I think it involves an apple and an orange hopping between bins.
Populism, as I understand it, doesn't constitute any particular philosophy because it is a mode of persuasion: "I'm one of you!"
Corporations and Marxist collectives, on the other hand, are human organizational structures. There are many other types, and all have their strengths and weaknesses. A populist mode of persuasion can be used to get people to join in an enterprise like the New Deal that will help them as individuals, or to get them to join the Reagan Revolution which is actually intended to make them docile drones on the corporate plantation. Populist arguments can be used to sell Stalinism, Nazism, or the People's Temple. Jesus was perhaps the Ur-populist.
None of this bears on any particular organizational structure. Some structure must exist; humans cannot live without society any more than bees can. Structures of different sorts compete and cooperate in society. Some of them can get out of control and endanger the whole society.
While the corporation has its purposes and does certain things very well, it cannot be ungoverned, or it becomes a new feudalism. This is in fact one of the biggest problems America has today: THom Hartmann calls it the "cancer stage of capitalism," when its unchecked growth threatens to destroy the society it inhabits. Marx diagnosed this very well, but didn't live to see the information-theoretical reasons why his brand of medicine wasn't the right answer (centralized economies don't allocate well, and centralized statism always ends in despotism by the most competitive psychopaths in the government).
It's always helpful to remember that humans were "designed" to live in villages of maybe a hundred souls, and all our larger organizational structures are attempts to make large societies function in a species that didn't evolve in them. This applies to our methods of persuasion as well. In a tribe of less than a hundred people, the chief doesn't need to say "I'm one of you!" and the chief can't really lead the tribe into an arrangement designed to cheat them either, at least not for long; he really is in the same boat.
Again, I think we're talking about two kinds of populism here.
Kind of like the difference between being democratic and Democratic. Or liberal and Liberal.
Nate is talking about populism with a small "p," which recently has been used to describe a philosophy of political behavior that can be adopted by anybody of any political stripe, right or left. Populism with a large "P" would be the political party of yore that our illustrious commentators are trying to correct Nate about.
Whether or not you find these two definitions in a dictionary, having watched the news a lot on the last twenty years and paying attention in my history classes, I've seen both definitions used. Populist with a small "p" has mostly been used on T.V. and radio, and Populist with a large "P" mostly in history class, in my experience.
wv: "ching" - the sound a capitalist pig likes to hear.
The Russian Revolution was going strong during and after the emancipation of the Serfs in the 1860s. I think it was 1863 but it's been a while since I studied the stuff. Anyways, there were huge problems with urbanization and Marxism and Hegel's stuff were HUGE in the worker population by the time the Czar made it official. Marx thought the revolution might have been possible. Luckily he didn't see 1905 (first Russian revolt) or 1917.
Like I said, let's call a spade a spade before we call someone what they want to be called. So I'm still not going to consider Harvey a Marxist just because he purports to be one. Macroeconomist thinking isn't based on Marx. Marx's theory is based on Smith and Ricardo. The man lived his life in London libraries studying classical economic theory. He added a lot to it. And he believed in capitalism. He just saw a natural evolution that stems from it and ruined his poor family in the process. They can be martyrs too, because that dude was smart.
Reverse income tax (basic guaranteed income) is Milton Freidman's idea. And the whole corporations thing is a staple of the 1960s Structuralist movement based on the merits of nationalizing FDI for host nations' citizens. I'll stop now, I'm not trying to argue either. I just feel like an idiot after not elaborating.
Anyway, I understand your pain. I did political economy. So I'm also picky. And thankfully you know what you're talking about so that's a nice change of pace from the usual people I talk Marx with.
Nate, can you please write four posts EVERY day? Thanks :)
First: I totally understand Nate's criticisms of Sirota's style. When reading Sirota, I often have the bizarre and uncanny feeling of being extremely irked depite agreeing with 95% of what he says. Also: Nate's original post that set of this debate - his defense of deference to the experts in the administration - was, unfortunately, an excessively authoritarian instance of "rational progressivism." Whereas I agree with what Nate says 95% of the time as well, that post happened to fall in the other 5%. All of this is to say that I'm dispositionally inclined to agree with what Nate says.
Having said that, this comment is unfair:
I don't know that David would literally endorse a Soviet-style economic order over Clintonism ... but given the lack of restraint and qualification that he tends to place on his opinions, he should think more carefully about where his conclusions lead
But David has never been making an abstract philosophical argument! He always frames his arguments in terms of the present political system in this country, and is usually addressing a particular policy or appointment when he makes such arguments. And in that context, inveighing against "corporate power" has a very clear meaning. It means corporations have too much power in our political system. I don't see any fair way to read Sirota as saying that corporations therefore ought to be banned; and he's saying nothing about the intrinsic nature of corporations outside of space and time. And like I said, I'm not favorably inclined towards Sirota's rhetoric. But to imply that Sirota's argument entails an endorsement of communism (let alone that it would necessarily be the Soviet brand of communism!) is just unfair.
I'm firmly on the progressive side of the progressive vs. populist debate, and I believe that regulated capitalism is far superior to Marxism. However, you can't compare the USSR to the US. The Soviets started with a far inferior economy than what we had in the US at the time. They could have grown at a greater rate without Marxism, but they did grow a country that was the laughing stock of Europe (they couldn't supply their troops with ammo in WWI) to one of the world's 2 superpowers. I only bring this up because Nate is usually very comprehensive in his analysis, and I thought that part was a little lacking.
Come on Nate. You are better than this. What people like Sirota advocate is a model of social capitalism that has worked well in most of Western Europe. He's not saying all corporations are evil. He's saying corporations have too much power in our government. I suspect most Democrats believe this to be true. Comparing him to Soviet Communism is well beyond and the pale and I expect much better from someone I respect so much.
I think you are good with stats, but as I said before you are not so good with political economic thought. The people hailing you are just as ignorant.
By the way, that's true of Sirota too. He often speaks from a place of ignorance.
My chief problem with you is the construct of critique of corporate power being Marxist.
This is not true. If you understood political economic thought beyond the limited view you get of at Chicago, then you would know this.
There are many competing theories for corporate power. That's again why you could have a moderate Republican create some of the most progressive legislation to bust the power of trusts that's lasted for a century.
You remind me of my professor in economics and anti-trust. So full of the Chicago School of Economic thought, that you aren't able to imagine other perspectives.
Let's talk practical. Since, that's where I dwell. The practical reality is that you can not regulate the issue of banks being too large to fail.
That issue is one of size. The thing you can do about that is to break them up. That maybe radical, but if you want a functioning market- it's the best idea.
Another point of reality- taking on bad debt without something in return is socialism from the perpective of big business. It does not address the underlying insolvency. It does not address the issue how we got here in the first place. Regulation can help.
But, regs can not save the world. Why? Because of the Courts. Much of the law that we would use has been narrowly focused by conservative Courts. Also, the issue of regs requires constant enforcement across multiple administrations. Whereas addressing size- so that a bank can be allowed to fail if it's going to fail. So that they are not so big that they can't fail will solve some of this. Forcing out ineffective managers who are right now insulated from the owners of the corporation by the very laws meant to protect owners is another factor. There are many more.
None of them are particularly Marxist unless you have some warped definition of the word.
Nor is asking about trade deals and other concerns particularly Marxist. There are competing theories about how trade deals should be structured. Are you saying that any country with an industrial policy is a marxist country? Since that's what much of the progressives in the U.S. are really talking about. They are not talkinga bout taking down capialism. They are discussing the type of capitalism under which we will live.
I am not sure how we got into Marxism. But your conversation from an political economic stand point is forced. Can you explain yourself better. right now, like many of you posters, you are coming across as an idiot on this subject.
I personally know an awful lot of people who walk away from writings like Sirota's and think, "Yeah, corporations are evil, let's scrap 'em!" So I imagine it's pretty easy to confuse the demagogue with the dittohead (to use terms loosely here).
sorry Nate, but you stepped in it last week when you argued for biting our collective tongues & 'letting the experts' run the show in DC...
you were only in it to your ankles then, but these last 2 flame wars with Sirota have you up to your neck in trying to defend your apparent & self-proclaimed elitism aka 'rational progressive' - and you are digging yourself in deeper as you flail about in quicksand
fwiw, what you refer to as 'radical prog' has intrinsic value that even the elite should heed - especially at this moment in time when the world needs REAL CHANGE that everyone can believe in
The thing about populists is that they tend to be convinced that they alone are the ones who know what's best for the proletariat - not economists, not social scientists and certainly not the proletariat itself. And numbers such as you bring up about Clinton are always irrelevant because they invariably mask some sort of great internal want among the proletariat and any improvement in its standard of living is dismissed as at best a piecemeal or temporary adjustment and at worst an illusion or a deception.
"To be fair, I don't know that David would literally endorse a Soviet-style economic order over Clintonism"
You have got to be kidding me.
This entire red-baiting of Sirota for arguing for more power for unions and workers seems silly to me. Was FDR advocating Stalinism?
"that neither unbridled laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism are anything approaching acceptable solutions...."
Really? Why? Because the USSR existed? You honestly just labeled someone as thinking in terms of Good Things and Bad Things only to throw away entire political systems with a ghost of an explanation?
You and Sirota both come off as angry people clinging to ideas which you only vaguely understand, so as to save your egos..I think you should stick to statistics.
TCB's comment was pretty deep. I hope anybody who skipped it goes back to reread it, especially the reminder that we're animals whose emotions are geared to interacting only with other known individuals, but we've tried to gerry-rig large-scale societies. We should expect things to go wrong. We should try to keep them from being as bad as the Depression, the World Wars, or the Great Leap Forward.
BTW, I hope everybody knows that this is not history: "I think it was 1863 but it's been a while since I studied the stuff. Anyways, there were huge problems with urbanization and Marxism and Hegel's stuff were HUGE in the worker population by the time the Czar made it official."
Whoops, there was almost no working class in Russia in 1863. Marxism didn't start to catch on there until much later, near the end of the century. Hegel was never big in any working class, thank god. Other than that, pretty accurate.
Nate,
Ive been a long time fan of yours since i first learned of the creation PECOTA.
As a free market libertarian, I do not really care much for a good portion of this argument, as rational thought and research mostly shows that tax cuts and transfer of power from the government to the private sector, helps all people regardless of social class.
However, that graph you show saddens me. As my analytical hero, it was disappointing to see that you would try and draw a conclusion from it. All the graph does is show correlation, and nothing at all of causation. There could be countless other variables not shown that could be reasons as to why there was significant growth of the lower class under Clinton.
In fact, Clinton in my opinion is getting a huge free pass for the mess were in. By passing measures that made it easier for poorer people to get loans for houses they could not afford, the credit and housing markets are in the death spiral they are in now because people were bankrupting themselves.
With the difficulty of getting a loan and the fast rising unemployment rates these populist/ progressive initiatives are hurting the very people they were supposed to be helping. Which is the very good point that I saw you make out of this, and hence the reasoning for my libertarian beliefs.
I hope you found some of what I had to say as insightful in a way that I find almost all your work.
Could you also please tell me that my white sox can trample their PECOTA forecasts again?
Nate himself tied 'rational progressive' to trust in the political status quo.
That is the inherent problem with Nate's dichotomy - rational progressive is NOT a movement for CHANGE... it is support for more of the same old same old compromising & influence peddling.
change does not come about from high approval ratings or patience & waiting for the right time...
rational progressivism will never deliver universal health care - that requires a real populist mass movement to overcome the entrenched powers in DC.
rational will only deliver more corporate welfare like the TARP & AIG bailouts & would sacrifice assistance to the auto industry for compromise while caving on 100's of BILLIONS in counter-productive tax cuts to pass a lame stimulus package...
politically rational, yes. but this is not 'progressive' nor reformative - it is accomodating [aka appeasement] and proponents are smug accepting the smallest of incremental changes in place of actual real change, so history is allowed & encouraged to repeat itself.
maybe that is why Obama & Nate want to rely on the same old 'experts' from the Clinton era - but without the restraint of a GOP congress this time ??? we will still get nothing resembling real change, especially on universal health care
that is when we really need some good populism to carry the day in spite of Obama & the rationalistas...
Michael - yeah, wasn't the weird thing about Marxism in Russia that Marx always predicted the workers' state arising in the most industrialized country (which would have been England at the time), but instead it ended up getting adopted in the bost agrarian and under-developed country in Europe? For that reason, a Marxist can always say Russia was just the wrong place at the wrong time for communism to work. (Not that that would be a debate-ender - far from it; but to argue or imply that anyone who supports communism (let alone David Sirota) would necessarily support the historical fact of the Soviet Union seems pretty mis-guided.)
a better comparison using the Soviet Union would be did 'rational progressives' change that country politically or did change come from populist movements ???
now China is a different can of worms. they appear to be suppressing the populist movement for change, and trying the incrementsl/rational progressive approach. but that hybrid of Maoist politics + incremental progressive capitalism is slow & seems to overwhelimingly favor a very few insiders at the expense of the masses & the environment, etc.
Nate...
You said it all with "elites manipulating popular opinion." The golden discovery of the GOP in the latter years of the 20th Century was the reaction to Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" catchphrase. It resonated almost miraculously with all the working class Joes who felt they were being left out of the political decision making process, and set the tone for all the Republican jokers that followed. Ronald Reagan refined and expanded this theme with his "Morning in America" and "Shining City on a Hill" crap, which amazingly cemented the GOP's appeal to the very people they were robbing.
These facile slogans are much less effective now that the people who believed in them so strongly have been given a good hard slap in the face by reality. "Morning in America" has come to mean facing yet another day with no idea what you are going to do to feed your family or even keep a roof over your head.
Nate,
I've thought you were great and spot on everytime I read you or see you on the toobe. I have to say as a registered 52 yr old chauvinist male that I am a little disappointed that you and this guy Sirota are engaging in this somewhat juvenile disagreement in public. I agree with you but who really cares? You two need to take this one outside. And as the godfather said...YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN!!!!
This site is getting gooood again. Nate's and Sean's last two posts have just been stellar. I for one am happy to see Nate taking on Sirota, as I've read numerous of his posts that were linked through Memeorandum, and I had just about had it to here with his holier-than-thou bullshit. However, it's probably time to move on now and start focusing on the real enemy again. I believe Sirota's actually a valuable foil on the left, and as such, is necessarily annoying.
Micheal:
A lot of the early memoirs and biographies of workers started with the generation born in the 1870s. Marx had already penetrated the intellegencia by this time and when these people were workers in the 1890s, they were the driving force of the 1905 revolts. I was wrong in saying that there was Marx in the working class in 1860s, but urbanization had surely begun. The emancipation of the peasants was, in part, a response to urbanization. It wasn't underway as strongly as it would be from 1870-1900, but it was definitely there. They weren't conscious workers, but there were workers.
Chachy:
Check out their agrarian movement. It had a lot in common with the Social Democrats (Marxists). And some of the earliest ethnographies come from studies of the Russian peasants of the late 19th century. They were a rough lot. Really cool stuff if you're interested.
It sickens me to see two liberals going at each other like this!
Rush and Karl must be thrilled.
What a piece of trash this blog entry is. That the American left wants to bring Soviet style socialism to America is so profoundly absurd that it doesn't even dignify a serious response.
Nate would do well to stop insulting the very people who brought the Obama movement (and him) to the forefront of American politics in the same manner as the likes of Limbaugh or Hannity.
I'm going to say something incredibly elitist:
A bit of populism can be useful for a progressive leader because some people do not understand or are not interested in science, research and data. Even Obama used populism - try to quantify slogans like "hope", "change", or "bipartisanship". It's just another way to appeal to different voters.
It's true though that populism isn't a political program on its own, at least not in America (and even in other countries it's more of a patchwork of "easiest solutions" taken from the far left and right). And so, populism shouldn't be the ultimate goal of a politician. But as this article notes, David Sirota's ultimate goal isn't populism - it's rather marxist. But honestly, Marxism is unelectable in the US, and so there is no real danger coming from Sirota.
You're "rational" and your somewhat leftier opponents are Marxist supporters of the Soviet Union? Good freaking grief, dude. Policing the left end of the political spectrum is foolish even in the service of the goals of "rational" progressivism. A stronger left critique opens the political space for a reformist agenda.
First time, long time. Just finished my daily Krugman reading which lead me to Baseline Scenario. Thoughts on their blog/theories?
Sorry Nate, but this post is even more ridiculous than your last one creating progressive typologies and going after Sirota (I know next to nothing of that guy and never read him - I'm certainly not defending him here because I don't particularly care about this debate between the two of you).
Bringing "populism" into this discussion only manages to make it more convoluted. You reference the more negative experiences of it in Europe, which is a valid point, but then say "we have a more neutral impression of it in the Americas." Obviously you have studied little or no Latin American history. The historical literature is rife with discussions of "populism" and what it has meant for the region (going back at least to the 19th century), and even down to the present "populist" is hardly a "neutral" concept (as is somewhat more the case in the U.S.).
But in the end your whole argument here comes down to two things which are not really very interesting at all: 1) I (that is Nate) don't care for David Sirota (fine, for all I know I don't either); and 2) I am some kind of capitalist, and not at all a Marxist.
Well terrific. But given the second point it's hardly surprising that you would say "In the real world, we need to recognize that corporations contribute to the economic well-being of the working class as well as detract from it; that neither unbridled laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism are anything approaching acceptable solutions, and that the trick is finding the optimum amount of regulation."
As a capitalist who is not a pure market fundamentalist (most folks are not) of course that is what you think - you want a semi-regulated capitalism. Anti-capitalists (and maybe Sirota is one and maybe not, I neither know nor care) would obviously disagree with you (as would market fundamentalists).
But of course you're not making an argument here, you're just telling us about a belief that you have (which is fine, just not very interesting). You simply say "we need to recognize" that your view is the better one and then point out that people did a bit better under Clinton (leftists would guffaw at the notion that those concerned with the "economic well-being of the working class" owe obeisance to Clinton simply because that era was better for workers than many others).
If you want to pick an intellectual fight with those who are not capitalists (which, frankly, seems a strange thing to do on this blog), you might want to bring a bit more to the table than some offhand comments about the Soviet Union (I know of literally no radical person, and I've known many, who supports that economic system) and how great Clinton was. I think you're starting a much bigger argument than you'd actually be willing to sustain, and the fact that it's somehow connected to this Sirota character makes it all rather bizarre. The sooner you put this to bed the better.
Hey Nate,
This is my first comment ever on your blog, so take this for what it is - a well-meaning recommendation. I like your commentary generally, and come exclusively to your political blog (I don't go to dailykos or any of the rest, and get the rest of my news from economist, nyt, etc.). I think what you had during the election, and immediately after, was a unique product, which is political commentary and predictions without the sniping with the other bloggers. I'm sure it's easy to get caught up with attacks from the other bloggers, and hard to ignore their jibes, but exactly this sort of blogger-a-blogger infighting is what turned me away from other blogs. I don't want this one to fall into the same trap!
I guess what I'm trying to say is, you have a unique product that I think attracts a unique set of readers, and I hope you avoid polluting that product with more of the same infighting that other bloggers fall prey to. At least for me, it then becomes less interesting.
My two cents :). Keep up the good work!
Nate, I think you need a little chill time. I mean I love your post even the bit more flamerific ones lately.
I am not against calling of the blogosphere to the the carpet they need to defend their work like the rest of us... But I agree this space and time could be better used. I am biased, but some analysis (with some opinion mixed in this time) of MN election court stuff would be cool.
Oh and seriously, I hope it isn't something truely distressing, I mean I just got laid-off and I am trying to look on the bright side (More time to finally read Depressionomics:2008 which should kick ass [waiting for libary to get it in])
I love this place and I hope to continue to be impressed.
So please Nate just grab a beer, some hot chick, and chillax friend.
SHADOW
not sure what Nate would do with a hot chick... but he definitely should learn to chillax or relill & extinguish this sophmoric flamewar
NATE
someone has already added your self-labeled tag as an avowed 'rational progressive' to your WIKI entry under 'political analysis', along with a lengthy cut & paste from yetserday's blog entry...
this is gonna haunt you when you read what you wrote about your own viewpoint in the future - it does not wear well on further reading & reflects poorly imho...
you could use an editor to bounce this stuff off of ??? or not
as I posted last night on Nate's intial flame blog directed toward Sirota
'rational progressive' would be the left equivalent to 'compassionate conservative'
both tags are oxymoronic or worse...
It's funny. It's always the elites who try to redefine populism when the rest of us know exactly what it means.
In the progressive netroots, and even among the general political class for the most part, the term refers to economic populism. It ain't rocket science.
Bringing up Hitler in this context, or even alluding to a non-economic definition is pure sophistry.
I won't bore you with how vernacular language often encodes potentially complex subjects to maximize communicative efficiency, for better and worse, but that is what is at play here.
Often time words evolve in the vernacular and nerdy little geeks like to huff about there literal meanings. BUt it's no use. Once a word has become code, there's not a lot you can do about it.
Like the word progressive, for example. As recently as 5 years ago, progressive referred to people like myself who identified specifically with the Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and had abandoned liberalism for its obsession with cultural issues while the plutocrats were walking out the back door with our furniture, and further, became alienated with liberal dependence on brain trusts of elitism who sit around all day arguing over the true definition of populism.
But, at the speed of a broadband internet connection, liberals who were tired of being called liberals from the rabid right suddenly became progressives. I even had one clown claim to me that the Bravo network was progressive because, presumably, they aired Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
The fact is, however, the original Progressive movement was inherently, economically populist.
"Taking on the power of corporations" is another code of sorts - depending on who's saying it. But there should be no mistake. Apple and Monsanto have one thing in common - they both are own by common stakeholders who are a part of a corrupt, corrosive culture we also vernacularly call corporatism.
And while corporatism does, in some respects, benefit society, their damage far, far outweighs those benefits. This damage is not just the result of a few bad apples, as Mr Silver would suggest. It is a systemic flaw in the organizational principle of the corporate structure. This is not the forum to educate on the perils of corporatism or to cite why some real experts on democracy, from Jefferson to Lincoln to both Roosevelts, abhorred them and saw them as the grave threats to our democracy that they are. But this: any time you have a system where men can act without consequence or accountability, you will inevitably find men at their worst. And that is the corporation in a nutshell.
We think of a corporation as if it is equal to its owners and employees, and ascribe the rights and freedoms of the workers and investors to the business. However, a corporation is a legal entity that protects it's investors from liability, and to a large degree we absolve the people who make decisions from personal responsibility. We need to weigh the benefits of protecting investors and the payoff of risk taking behavior against the cost to society when things don't go quite as expected.
"as I posted last night on Nate's intial flame blog directed toward Sirota
'rational progressive' would be the left equivalent to 'compassionate conservative'
both tags are oxymoronic or worse..."
The funniest thing in this whole argument is that you thought that comment was worth repeating.
Here, we generally aim for nuance and poise.
Still, there's nothing wrong with a good brawl now and then. If Nate wants to spend a couple of days blasting David Sirota, then hooray for him. Many of the commenters here have unrealistically rigid and projective expectations of the tone/content of Nate's posts (not to mention all the grief that Sean's been getting lately). Neither Nate nor Sean are intellectually or ideologically accountable to any of you, so knock off the "I'm so disappointed in you/you're above this" bullshit.
"It's funny. It's always the elites who try to redefine populism when the rest of us know exactly what it means."
And yet you got it wrong.
You know what YOU think it means. Or what it means to you. But there is hardly a consensus or general agreement that it refers only to economic populism.
How you wish a term was encoded is a very different thing from how it actually is.
"It's true though that populism isn't a political program on its own, at least not in America (and even in other countries it's more of a patchwork of "easiest solutions" taken from the far left and right). And so, populism shouldn't be the ultimate goal of a politician. But as this article notes, David Sirota's ultimate goal isn't populism - it's rather marxist. But honestly, Marxism is unelectable in the US, and so there is no real danger coming from Sirota."
Not that I disagree with your larger point, but I'd like to point out that the "danger" from people like Sirota is PRECISELY because Marxism is unelectable in the US.
Any movement that does want to get elected into power should take pains not to be associated with people who espouse unelectable ideas, especially if they espouse them in a dishonest manner.
People "on our side" who act no better than people "on their side" absolutely should be called out.
I like the part where David Sirota compares himself with Martin Luther King. That was the part where his self-aggrandizing bullshit became too much to handle.
There is the logical leap from "no corporate power" to "state socialism" and the whole emphasis on it.
That being said what I think there are reasons to despise transformative change beyond the whole soviet canard.
To make a programming comparison there is an essay out about the cathedral and the bazzar at The cathedral and the bazzar
The point it makes is that incremental solutions deal much better with bugs. And the same applies to policy as law is just software on humans.
Fundamentally I don't trust transformative change because it does not rigorously test every element of its plan for usability, efficiency, and so on before moving to the next step.
I think that incrementalism is the real populist position. Transformative change is much more likely to come from CEOs and dictators rather than a democracy.
To make a corporate comparison
If you look at google the reason why they can put out so many great and solid products is because they embrace the incrementalist mindset. They don't give their engineers direction and if something bubbles up and becomes popular more people can work on it and produce a better more solid product.
Whereas microsoft embraces the transformative mindset. The process is locked down and resistant to input so the leader of the team can execute their goals. The problems are that they generally release bug filled products that execute a singular vision by people who have little ability to change the product for the better.
@A: Populism both in Europe and the USA has one common strain: chauvinism and xenophobia. (a) "Pro-America" France, UK, etc., with opposition to international government (UN, EU). (b) Anti-immigrant (and anti-immigration).
Its "popular base" is in the less educated segment of the "core" population of the country.
@John
"Any movement that does want to get elected into power should take pains not to be associated with people who espouse unelectable ideas..."
But of course electoral politics are just one (admittedly important) aspect of our civic discourse, and good ideas are not limited to those that are popular. Abolitionists were not popular in the 1830s, nor were women suffragists in the late 19th century. But they did have some very good ideas.
I'm not saying that contemporary Marxist critiques are necessarily of a piece with anti-slavery and suffragist appeals, but history is filled with "radical" ideas that begin life in the margins and later end up (thankfully) in the mainstream. "Progressives" should always be on the lookout for those kind of ideas, even when they may not be electorally popular.
We should never be afraid of ideas and of debate, nor automatically label as "dangerous" viewpoints which are espoused by a minority based on the notion that the fringe will screw up things for the rational folks. If the view in question is in and of itself a bad one then so be it, but just because a viewpoint does not win votes is not ipso facto a reason for its rejection (nor, of course, is it ipso facto an argument in its favor).
Note that this is a general point and I'm not saying anything specific about the argument between Sirota or Nate.
Regarding Clinton and homes, getting poor people into home ownership was a noble goal, both in terms of opportunity and creating a better less crime-ridden social fabric. (1992 wasn't very pleasant for many). The costs of that policy were not so big if it had been managed, not ignored to run free, and much of the damage was not at the individual level, but at the corporate level (urged on by a corrupt administration).
The big issue is that it's hard to blame problems that were already pointed out in 1999 on a President who left office in 2001. We knew Fannie Mae needed reforming. The President and Congress had plenty of time to attack Social Security and Iraq, but nothing for Fannie Mae? The tax cuts in 2001 were huge - that money could have bolstered the mortgage market rather than going to the rich in the hopes they'd produce more.
Encouraging home ownership was good policy, just like with the GI Bill for home loans and education post-WWII. The fact that the new idiot in charge couldn't manage anything right doesn't make this program in particular bad. Look at every other program Bush ran. Find a common thread?
All in all, a good story, Nate, but I would have appreciated it if you would have shown even greater restraint in attacking Sirota. Concluding that his politics would lead to a Soviet style system really goes too far, based on the flimsy evidence. No misunderstanding, I criticized David even harsher at OpenLeft for his response which includes several ad hominem attacks. But when a discussion has become such a flame war, much more caution should be applied before making overbroad arguments.
So, I can only congratulate you on seeing this yourself, as evident in your addendum. This isn't only good for getting back to rational discourse, imho the party that shows more restraint is also much more likely to be seen as a winner in such an argument. Don't let the outrageous distortions of demagogues drive you down into the mud, keep up your good work!
Populism has been best defined in Canada in its full bloom as Agrarian Populism as espoused by the CCCF, the only political populist party to ever get control of a state government anywhere. At the same time there were various similar groups in the USA which played a strong role in influencing state & federal governments.
The basic underpinning is anti international, anti market dominance by non-farming organisations, strong emphasis on government owned transport & pretty strongly conservative on all social issues. They were also pretty strong on government / party owned communications too & that was borne out here in Australia when the the Western Australian Country Party (the most populist political organisation ever seen in Australia) became the first political party in this country to own a radio station as well as a newspaper. Populism has never really bloomed outside rural areas, & I kind of find it strange that it is now being applied to an urban based population.
It is nearly 40 years since I steeped myself in the CCCF, so someone else might like to have more input here!
Geoff - Well said and I do agree.
I put "danger" in quotes to keep it in context.
I also think your bigger point is well taken. I think it is important to distinguish between ideas and their... delivery systems.
I am willing to discuss almost anything as openly as I can... but I will push back against someone trying to sell me something. In my experience most people that are truly radical, whatever their political bent, are not that interested in an exchange of ideas.
Can I say that I broadly agree with Nate's classification (and there's probably a groundbreaking political science paper in there somewhere), but where does someone like LBJ fit in? Hardly an intellectual, his prime political motivation was 'helping out the little guy'. Does that make him a radical/populist progressive? I doubt it, because he also had little interest in bashing big corporations or large-scale redistribution of wealth. LBJ was famously not unwilling to make deals - Medicare was a bit of a legislative fudge, to be honest. And of course, there's Vietnam, which he had little interest in but which inevitably came out of his patriotism/nationalism.
Is there a sub-category, then, in 'rational progressive' for an 'emotional progressive' of the LBJ mould (and I believe that there are still a lot of this type out there, many of them on the fringes of politics, who simply want a 'fair deal for the little guy'.) Or are the two unreconcilable? What a question.
More broadly, it's interesting how American politics seems to shun overarching political ideologies. Unlike most political parties across the world (and unlike the Republicans who are apparently members of the conservative IDU), the Democrats have refused to affiliate with either the Liberal or Socialist Internationals. In Britain, ideology is by no means the be all and end all, but bloggers for the Labour Party (majority party) and Liberal Democrats (3rd party, 20% of popular vote in 2005, of which I am a member) like to think about socialism and social democracy, and liberalism respectively. Although 'progressivism' is increasingly gaining popularity, its vagueness makes politicos unwary of it. In other words, the American left is unusual for its unwillingness to commit to either liberalism or socialism (and, of course, to be the only major industrial nation never to have a serious Socialist movement).
arylryl: a drug to relieve chesty coughs
DCM in FL
I am interested that you don't think progressivism is rational. Was ending slavery not rational? Was introducing medicare not rational? Was extending voting rights not rational? To give just three examples.
Nick Sanders, Chavez is fascist and socialist too.
He´s not progressive and not liberal, and of course not conservative.
He´s a fascist-socialist dictator who want total government control, that´s the common sense between fascists and socialists.
Nate, Just wanted to tell you thanks for trying to draw out the philosophy of the main bloggers at Open Left. I know many writers here are criticizing this "flame war", but I think it is necessary sometimes. The main authors at Open Left, Dail Kos, My DD and other left sites have some influence. Many of them want more.. and guys like Sirota are being called on by the media as spokes people for the left. I think it's important that readers know where the bloogers' really stand and what is the logical conclusion if our legistators\leaders followed the bloggers' advice.
As an aside, anyone defending the Open Left authors should really look at the moderation at that site and the reply(s) one gets if critical of the authors. It always gets personal with David, Paul, and Chris when you disagree. So if they are called out, as in this case, in a place where they can't boot you (yes they booted me during the election, because I posted a criticism of Chris slamming Obama's Caninets picks (http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10347) BTW my comment was deleted and I haven't been able to log in since... User sc1962)...., I think that is good for the entire community. If you want to go public with your opinions, then your opinions should be open to critique as well..
Here at least Nate you take the good and the bad.. Please continue.. this is one reader who really appreciates your willingness to take on your own side.
steve c
Watch out. To give a president credit for economic growth or decline is dangerous, particularly when you start to fudge your data. To eliminate a "transition year" because the previous Presient was in office for three weeks is a bit of a fudge. Also, One shouldn't be to quick to creidt Clinton with helping the working poor. most of the welfare & poverty changes during that administration originated on the other side of the aisle, from a hostile congress.
Nate,
I think you are making a good point but you seem guilty of using socialism and communism interchangably just as others use populism and progressivism. As someone who happily identifies as a socialist I would really rather you not do this. Remember, Animal Farm was written by a socialist and it is not a very pro-communism sort of book at all.
Indeed, socialism leaves a lot of room for corporate wealth creation.
Nate-In the addendum, you seem to place the blame on Sirota for being too simplistic.
I would still like to know if FDR as a stalinist because he tried to reign in corporate power and he supported things like workers rights and real economic change.
Using the term rational for your viewpoint and comparing the other viewpoint to a totalitarian regime is far beyond the pale.
If Sirota is Karl Marx, then Madonna is Rosa Luxemburg.
They have Redstate we have Sirota or Kos on one of his bad hair days. None of them are where the country is. That's where Nate, Obama and I are more or less located. We want pragmatic left of center governance but realize that in our system politics is, as Disraeli pointed out, the art of the possible. Obama and the country needed a swift stimulus bill. This narrowed his parliamentary options. He couldn't sit there for weeks of parliamentary maneuvering while the GOP self destructed reading telephone directories. On other less urgent matters there will be time for this. Instead he let them gallop into a canyon with OBSTRUCTION and WE WANT FAILURE posted over the gate and when this notion was firmly planted on the national consciousness, he slammed the gate behind them. Now I can understand the right not accepting this obvious fact which is confirmed by just about every poll out there but when the far left does it just seems perverse or as self destructive as Republican tactics. Neither make any sense.
Open Left and its grandiosity and paranoia strike again. Sirota and company suffer from the delusion that they are the keeper of the "progressivist" flame,and "progressivism" is whatever they say it is at the time. They have managed to marginalize themselves to the point that no credible Dem. candidate is going to be connected with them. They are busy doing the work of Rush Limbaugh with their daily attacks on the Obama administration.
Nate, I am beyond disappointed with this post. Honestly, I am totally depressed. I can't believe you are red-baiting a fellow progressive blogger. Even if I did totally disagree with Sirota, I'd think that this is the worst post I have ever read from someone on the democratic side of the political spectrum. But, I DO agree with Sirota -- and you should too. Look at every issue we care about (health care, global warming, etc.), corporations have been buying off politicians and lobbying furiously to stop progress for decades. Sirota's frame is not inaccurate.
The stricter y'all vie over definition, the lesser relevance you have to more people.
Defending David: Challenging corporate power => might mean re-balancing the Bush era overwhelming corporate favortism to a more equal structure.
Nate, you are on the money as usual. Just remember, though, that rational arguments tend to resonate only with rational people. Not many folks from Kansas appreciated "What's the Matter With Kansas," but that didn't make it not true. I'm reminded of the "West Wing" episode where Josh Lyman discovers the political blogosphere, decides to respond to one blogger's badly reasoned critique, and then finds himself still at the computer hours later, frazzled and frustrated at all the criticism he was receiving from the uneducated masses. Fact is, and I say this as an unabashed (but reality-based) progressive, we've got a whole wing of the Democratic party that lacks both the ability to understand the real-world implications of economic policy, and the practical perspective to understand how sausages get made. A wing that has no idea that by "dangerous" you mean in their ability to frustrate what should be the party's greater goals (e.g., intra-party debate on NAFTA/free trade preventing us from uniting to achieve meaningful tax reform for the benefit of the working class, and a greater safety net for the poor).
And yes, they're also bitter, because their party ignores them much in the way the Republican party ignores the religious right, and for the same reason: where else they gonna go? For whom else could they possibly vote? This doesn't mean they shouldn't be ignored (at least when they're as wrong as Sirota so often is), but it should help explain the self-righteous and accusatory tone, and hopefully allow cooler heads to prevail from our side.
Anyway, just wanted to toss in my two cents, and to let you know there's a whole swarm of us here who've got your back. Now go get those PECOTAs done!
"I personally know an awful lot of people who walk away from writings like Sirota's and think, "Yeah, corporations are evil, let's scrap 'em!" So I imagine it's pretty easy to confuse the demagogue with the dittohead (to use terms loosely here)."
This is the root issue here. I haven't read enough Sirota to say what his goals really are. I have however read enough Sirota to say that he gives the impression of despising the corporation in general. I don't have the background to do the political heavy lifting that a lot of the people posting here are doing. It doesn't take great political knowledge to get Nate's point though - that some of Sirota's writings cross a line into the worst sort of ideology, a world of "Good Things and Bad Things and Capital Letters".
Again, I realize my own limitations and that I'm out of my league in trying to argue political history with the people posting here. But clearly Sirota gives the impression of feeling that all corporations are Evil and that those that wield corporate power are by extension also Evil. Nate probably could have worded his retorts better and instead of attacking Sirota's ideas attacked his presentation. That doesn't change the fact that Sirota's presentation is damaging to any progressives that don't hold to a very radical agenda. By giving the impression of rejecting all corporate power he goes too far.
"3. In Sirota's case, the immediate-term goal appears to be the dissolution of corporate power.
. . . .Notice, however, that Sirota does not place any modifier (such as "corrupt") next to "corporate economic power". He appears to regard corporate economic power as intrinsically evil. There aren't a lot of shades of gray; there isn't a lot of distinction between Exxon and Apple, between MBNA and Starbucks."
Entrenched corporate economic power IS intrinsically evil, and that's something that Progressives have understood for more than a century.
It's NOT a pretty distinction between "nice" corporate power and "bad" corporate power and it has NOTHING to do with whether a few corporate leaders are corrupt. Corruption is a SYMPTOM of power unleashed from fear of consequences. Concentrated corporate power over every aspect of our lives is the disease and that's NOT something new!
Both Mussolini and FDR understood this, they differed only about it's desirability:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini.
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people allow the concentration of corporate power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in it’s essence is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
-- Franklin Roosevelt
Concentration of wealth leads to directly to concentration of POWER! It leads to government favoring the rich at the expense of everybody else and has for centuries. Once business elites concentrate wealth in their hands through favorable tax and regulatory laws they use that very wealth to concentrate political control, by BUYING politicians.
This was the central problem of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century that LED to the creation of the progressive movement in the first place, with it's demands for such things as Anti-trust legislationn, the 8 hour day, the 40-hour week, child-labor legislation, voting rights for women, and other progressive economic legislation such as government regulation of business in the interest of the majority of the American people, much of which was incorporated into the New Deal.
Paul Krugman writes:
The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.
Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here."
This is NOT just about a few corrupt or "bad" corporations or some corporations going "a little over the line." It's about a profoundly corrupt and dangerous system that desperately needs to be brought under control by the PEOPLE, through their only means to protect themselves -- government regulatory power.
And THAT is the Progressive ideal, and has been for a century: that government power should be directly used to protect the majority of the people instead of the elites, and to advance the interests of the people as a whole even if that means damaging the interests of the most wealthy and powerful.
Conservatism is the OPPOSING view, that concentrated wealth and power is natural and should certainly not be interfered with by government.
Conservatism at it's core is nothing more than a set of arguments favoring the existence of a NATURAL ARISTOCRACY, in this era, one formed by our corporate governing elites.
A thoroughly horrible post by Nate Silver. He should stick to polling. otherwise he brings nothing to the table but ancient cliches.
1880-1940 populists of one sort or another, including populist progressives, were responsible for and enormous amount of political progress. Since the Democrats exiled the populists during and after WWII, we've had mostly Republican Presidents or weak corporate-Democratic Presidents (the exception being 1960-1968, and th Johnson administration was destroyed by the Vietnam War).
Sirota is ignorant and destructive.
When measuring value of an asset we generally measure return and risk. Given that Clinton provided good return to poor, I think there is a case to be made that he increased risk (welfare reform). One would need to assess your indifference curve to determine if you liked him or not.
Look, people who are slagging at Kos and Open Left are not progressives. They're centrists. Centrists dominated the Democratic party for at least 20 years, threw away the 2000 election, and did very little better in the 2004 election.
The increasing success of the Democrats has coincided with a rise in populism, which the centrists had tried to destroy or expel for two decades or more. Count your blessings and don't try to purge the party now that it's finally having a little success.
Clinton chose to work with Republicans instead of Democrats, and that's the way centrists usually are. Short-term success, long-term disaster. Clinton destroyed the Democratic Congress.
11:32: Silver is ignorant and destructive. Damn.
I've written too much on this on Open Left, check it out if you're interested.
Here, I'll say only this:
The idea that there's nothing of any importance between the corporate-hegemony we now experience and Soviet Communism is ridiculous. This is a staple of the Friedmanite thinking you imbibed, perhaps without knowing it, at the U of C. Those like myself, a bit older than you, can actually remember a United States not so polarized, not so Wall St. centric, and remember it fondly. We'd like to be there again. But we can't as long as free-market fundamentalists stand in the way.
You constantly accuse Sirota of being simplistic - but your squeezing of the entire range of choices between hyper-capitalism and Soviet Communism into nothing is far more simplistic than anything Sirota's said.
Worse yet, you seem, after one month of the Obama administration, to be angling for the job of enforcer of this orthodoxy. That is what turned a political discussion into an ugly flame war.
k
The “risk” with analysis like this is that it seems to paint a dichotomy. Whenever you create an analysis that has two sides, the way you have done, you are sure to get a reaction, especially from people who think there are only two sides. And it doesn't matter how many disclaimers you include. You can say until you are blue in the face that the world is more complicated, there are many shades of grey, whatever. Usually when you paint a two-sided picture, you are only to some degree accurate, simply because the world is not back and white. That leaves you open to polemic. Hence, the Sirota tirade. And while I tend to agree (generally) with your post, I think it may have been better to present your characterization on a scale. But that wouldn’t have produced a polemic. And as Fox News has proven time and time again, polemic produces ratings.
(sorry about the last post. if someone plays cleanup, cans delete?)
Nate, I think you are dramatically misreading Sirota. Sirota sees the blackmail and other tools that Adam Smith would take up a rifle against, and rails against the politicians that are their enablers. He sees, as I have seen, many corporations (Creative) working in ways that actively squash competition.
Isn't it possible that he just wants a better regulated free market? One where we don't get stupid laws just because a corporation wants them (seatbelt laws)?
But beyond that, YES, there were skyrocketing Alcoholism rates in Communist Russia. BUT current russia is an anarchy, and there are ALSO skyrocketing Alcoholism rates. More random deaths too. One might be tempted to conclude that Russians are more alcoholic than Americans, in general. You know what? There's scientific evidence for this. Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Somewhere, among these three statements, is Nate Silver's Unified Theory of Economics, Class Warfare, and Punditry.
"Any attempts to restrict the influence of corporations on governmental policy is equivalent to Marxism."
"The solid economic performance of a Democratic administration can be directly traced to how much they acted like Republicans, assuming that America was founded in 1993."
"Commentators shouldn't view the world in black/white terms, or selectively choose facts, as that seriously dilutes their reliability."
I think you grossly misunderstand David Sirota's goals.
His aim isn't to advance a coherent or consistant political philosophy - it's advance sales of his books and increase syndication of his column.
In other words, it's all about the money for Sirota - no more, no less. He's as about as deep as a birdbath - pay him the same attention.
Dave - "Nate, you are on the money as usual. Just remember, though, that rational arguments tend to resonate only with rational people."
Ain't that the truth.
And boy have these comment threads proved it.
Reading your response to Sirota's enlightens my understanding of your argument. This is not about two schools of progressive thought; it is about demonstrating the differences you have with one person's ideas. The problem is, when you choose to do this categorically, you end up marginalizing an entire group of people who all seek to contribute to the same ends of equality and economic justice as you.
Your distinction that populism is not "a cogent philosophy unto itself" is accurate in a Websteresque definitional manner, but you ignore the reality that progressive populism is a valid, though broad, and sustained force in American politics. Sirota represents one distinct school of progressive populists, but there are many more "rational" contributors to the movement who would identify as distinctly more capilitalistic. They would also (this writer included) have an outspoken criticism of Clinton's NAFTA, the DLC, and the Democratic establishment's relationship with the lobbying industry.
My advice to you, Nate: let your feuds continue to play out on your blog. It is certainly fun to read. But don't suck the rest of us in. We've all got more important fights.
Perhaps I'm just too old and remember too vividly when such things really made a life-and-death difference, when dark accusations were used to stigmatize, threaten, silence, and ruin those who desired progressive change. But I must say that I really couldn't believe my eyes when I read this article. I find your red-baiting of David Sirota to be infuriating, deeply offensive, and distasteful.
I was only vaguely aware of the existence of Mr. Sirota until you began this open argument with him here. But in going back and reading his work, while I don't necessarily agree with all of it or always like the tone of his writing, I certainly see nothing there that even comes close to supporting the charge you so casually toss out.
So, what you are really doing here is engaging in a just barely veiled center-left McCarthyism (and let us not forget, that there were many on the center-left who went along with McCarthy) in order to stigmatize and marginalize your opponent, rather than taking on his actual arguments. This is really unconscionable and indefensible behavior for anyone with any sense of history at all who would call him or herself a "progressive."
Nate, Nate, Nate,
Not only are your preliminary dipping of toes into progressive politics a little misguided, but to create such a ludicrously reductive straw man as either one is for Clintonian third way economics or one wants a Soviet-style economy is breathtaking. Has Sirota EVER advocated such a thing? Many of us on the left side of the spectrum favor a Euro/Canada style social democracy, and your false choice argument does you no credit. It is also clear you are driven by a real personal animus of Sirota, and as others have observed, you are bordering on DLCstyle let's drum the lefty out of the fire circle arguments. You are clearly trying to transition from a basically middle of the road Dem-oriented numbers crunching site, something you truly excel at, to political analysis, in which case you may want to educate yourself a little on the issues and the players. Again, to make the choice Sirota is positing one between Clintonism and Stalinism is just not worthy of extended thought.
Go forth and learn a little, read up a little, and get a little nuance yourself, Nate, drop the cage match with Sirota, and in the meantime, stick to numbers crunching, which you do so well.
Nate, I've been here since the beginning but you need to stop this. Marxist? One can easily critique neo-liberalism without being a Marxist. I wish there were more Marxists around, actually, but being critical of neoliberalism doesn't make one a Marxist.
Nick Sanders sucks: You really seem to have little understanding of Marxism. David Harvey is definitely a Marxist: read his Limits to Capital. You don't know what you are talking about.
-A: Arrighi's Long Twentieth Century is very useful, but Adam Smith in Beijing is a big let down--I certainly wouldn't call it a good Marxist work. What field are you in?
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New term: consumerism. Not communism, which assumes a common, centrally controlled economy. Not populism, which is an agenda of majority rule on whatever surface whim at the time.
Instead, a perspective of the interests of the person paying out the bucks for things/services the corporations/businesses of any size/governments are providing. This isn't necessarily Nader-ism per se, but at minimum an acknowledgment of the values and needs of the 'customer' and NOT just the benefit to the shareholder nor getting re-elected.
Perhaps that concept would go far in influencing public policy in a way that neither of the positions debated here provide.
Rational argument fail:
"To be fair, I don't know that David would literally endorse a Soviet-style economic order over Clintonism"
Seriously!? You're polling analysis is top notch, but this is just a fucking joke. Being to the left of Clinton doesn't make you a Soviet sympathizer. Criticizing Clinton also doesn't mean you don't think we was the best president of the last 30 years. Most progressives respect the fact that Clinton has a great record when compared to other recent presidents, the issue is that we feel he could have done better. You are too smart to not realize this, so I have to assume you are just being dishonest.
Nate:
Workers' state = good.
Corporate state = bad.
Workers = make stuff.
Corporations = steal stuff.
Workers' state = democracy.
Corporate state = fascism.
(Look it up).
The workers are the majority. We are the workers. Corporations are the minority. They are not the workers. But they make all the money. This is bad, not good. The sooner we move on from this state of affairs the better. Perhaps, you haven't noticed the economic mess we're in. Or global warming. There's an article in today's New York Daily News. Experts are predicting a 4 foot rise in the water level in NYC. They're going to have to build very expensive flood walls. Katrina, anyone? Who did this to us. The Soviet Union? Finally, Soviet-style communism is not the only option. That would be like saying that Nazi capitalism (fascism) is the only kind of capitalism.
Oh, almost forgot. Clinton was bad for workers: NAFTA? Welfare Reform? A rise in part-time jobs, not well-paying full-time jobs? He was great for corporations, though.
Nate,
Most of what I wanted to say has already been said, but here's a key thing that you are missing.
The critique of corporate power is as much about corporate political power as it as about corporate economic power. And that, is in and of itself a dangerous thing, whether the corporations are corrupt at not. If you treat corporations as people, they essentially become super people with more power and rights than everyone else and more political power.
If you want to read a coherent non-marxist critique of Corporatism, check out the work of David Korten, particularly When Corporations rule the World. A more mainstream view can be seen in Charles Derber's Corporation Nation.
My major, and for the most part only, problem with your original argument & delineations of progressiveness is with your framing. Rational vs Radical. But the opposite of rational is irrational not radical. One can be radical & not irrational. One of the few times of agree with Sirota is when he says that this is right-wing framing. It is & that's what you need to think about.
Nate,
Nice read. I do want to point out one nuance you might have missed. In your clarification of the good versus bad corporation, you use Exxon versus Apple as an example. I live in Alaska and have a somewhat different perspective. Exxon does an amazing job at providing energy. Without energy everything stops. Exxon, whether we like them or not, are intrinsic catalysts to how we all live, not just in Alaska, but anywhere an airplane takes off or an ambulance drives.
So anybody who has a categorical problem with "corporate economic power" is presumptively a Soviet-style Communist? That's rank red-baiting. I'm very disappointed in Nate.
4. A world dissolute of corporate power implies one of two things: state socialism or social anarchism.
When I suggest that Sirota's modes of thought are Marxist, I don't mean that figuratively. I mean that literally: the logical conclusion to his project is some version of a workers' state.
WTF? First Nate acknowledges that social anarchism is a possibility, and then insists that Sirota must want a "Soviet-style economic order"?
Nice one. Politics done right!
Also, the notion that Sirota is a communist slights communists everywhere.
I agree with almost everything you've written here, as well as in your original post.
That said, we need voices - prominent voices - like Sirota's in order to yank the Overton Window back toward a moderate, if not rational progressive point.
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