It Didn’t Work So Do It More

See if you can find the logical flaw in this AP news report: French growth sputters to a halt in 2nd quarter,

The French government was put under further pressure to cut deeper into spending after figures Friday showed growth in Europe’s second biggest economy ground to a halt in the spring, in another sign that the global economy is facing rising recessionary threats.

With the worse-than-expected French growth figures suggesting a possible budget shortfall this year, government ministers may have to find additional savings…

Right, the cuts are slowing the economy, which means the deficits are worse, so they “have to find additional savings.” Cutting government – taking money out of the economy – slowed their economy, so they think they’ll solve the problem by taking more money out of their economy. Austeridiocy.

Austeridiocy Here, Too

Our leaders, in their austeridiot geniosity, “solved” the made-up “debt-ceiling crisis” with a two-step process. First they will take about $1 trillion out of the economy right away. Then a 12-member “Super Congress” will try to come up with another $1.2 – 1.5 trillion to take out of the economy. If they can’t come up with a deal, then there will be across-the-board cuts to take that money out of the economy.

The idea is that by taking that money out of the economy, there will be more money in the economy. And with less money in the economy, the resulting increases of money in the economy will bring more tax revenue. This strategery was thought up by the crowd that claims cutting taxes increases tax revenues. (It is important to notice that the ideas that come from this crowd always, always, always, always, always, always, always end up making the rich richer and the biggest corporations bigger at the expense of the rest of us. So maybe they’re smarter than their ideas make them appear.)

Cuts Only Shift Costs, They Don’t Cut Costs

The things government does have to be done, and cutting government doesn’t get rid of the need, it just shifts the costs. Cutting government budgets only shifts the cost away from the wealthier taxpayers who were asked to pitch in and give back to the system that enabled their wealth. It removes the “take care of and watch out for each other” concept of democracy and puts the costs on the backs of vulnerable individuals. Cutting government doesn’t remove the costs from the larger economy, and often increases the costs to the larger economy.

Example: Health care for old people is provided by government because they need the health care. If you cut or phase out Medicare the health problems of the elderly don’t go away. And the cost to the economy is still there. In fact, by shifting these costs from government onto the back of the elderly themselves it increases the cost to the overall economy because it gets rid of the economy-of-scale government offers. Individuals do not have government’s ability to buy in bulk for millions and negotiate for lower costs. And by pitting individuals against the giant predatory insurance corporations, the individuals end up paying even more, which further increases the costs to the overall economy. Finally, pushing these costs onto vulnerable individuals drains what’s left of their money, which lowers their participation in the rest of the economy, further cutting consumer demand.

That Trick Never Works

See if you can find any examples in history of government budget cuts increasing economic growth. But there are examples in history of government cuts slowing growth. This is because taking money out of the economy slows the economy’s growth.

An Alternative That Will Work

What if, instead of doing things that have always failed, we addressed our economic slowdown in a way that has always worked in the past? What if we took this opportunity to invest in repairing our aging, crumbling infrastructure, bringing it up to 21st-century standards? The long-term result of this would be an economy that is more efficient and competitive in world markets, which would of course help our businesses. But more important right now this would mean hiring millions of people to do the work. These people would then be paying taxes and would not be receiving unemployment, food stamps, etc. So of course this would help lower deficits. Also they would be participating in the economy again, making their mortgage payments, buying clothes, even cars. So of course this would help the economy.

The Contract For The American Dream And The Emergency Jobs Bill

The Contract For The American Dream And The Emergency Jobs Bill both call for investment in repairing and modernizing our infrastructure, to improve our economy and to create millions of jobs. So does The People’s Budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The first step in the Contract For The American Dream (please, please click through) is:

Invest in America’s Infrastructure

Rebuild our crumbling bridges, dams, levees, ports, water and sewer lines, railways, roads, and public transit. We must invest in high-speed Internet and a modern, energy-saving electric grid. These investments will create good jobs and rebuild America. To help finance these projects, we need national and state infrastructure banks.

The Fact Sheet about this idea begins,

For decades America has deferred maintenance of our public infrastructure – our roads, bridges,
airports, ports, rail, levees, schools, broadband, wastewater and sewage systems, energy systems, and
waterways. This infrastructure serves the public’s safety and welfare needs and supports the nation’s
economic growth and competitiveness. This is a core function of government and we aren’t doing it.

This is work that has to be done. This is millions of jobs that need doing, while millions of our people are looking for work. Instead of taking money out of our economy, let’s invest in our economy and our people, and live off the dividend.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

Whenever these contentious arguments erupt, a common response from progressives is to bemoan the “circular firing squad” and point to the right, where this sort of self-destructive behavior is rarely ever seen. Instead, the right exhibits a fanatic message discipline that would have made the Politburo envious. Grover Norquist holds his famous “Wednesday meetings” where right-wing strategy and message are coordinated. Frank Luntz provides the talking points, backed by his research. And from there, and from numerous other nodes in the right-wing network, the message gets blasted out. Conservatives dutifully repeat the refrain, which becomes a cacophony that generates its own political force. Republicans ruthlessly use that message, that agenda, to shift the nation’s politics to the right, even as Americans themselves remain on the center-left of most issues.

“Can’t we be more like them?” ask these progressives who understandably grow tired of the Obama wars. The conservatives’ disciplined communications strategy typically gets ascribed to one of these factors. Some see it as an inherent feature of their ideology – the right is hierarchical, the left is anarchic. (Of course, the 20th century Communist movement disproved that.) Others see it as an inherent feature of their brains – conservatives are said to have an “authoritarian” brain where everything is black and white and where values and ideas are simply accepted from a higher-up, whereas liberals have brains that see nuance and prize critical thinking, making them predisposed to squabble instead of unite. And still others just see the conservatives as being smarter, knowing not to tear each other down, with the implication that progressives who engage in these bruising internal battles simply don’t know any better, or are so reckless as not to care.

Perhaps some of those factors are all at work. But I want to argue that the truth is far simpler. Conservatives simply understand how coalitions work, and progressives don’t. Conservative communication discipline is enabled only by the fact that everyone in the coalition knows they will get something for their participation. A right-winger will repeat the same talking points even on an issue he or she doesn’t care about or even agree with because he or she knows that their turn will come soon, when the rest of the movement will do the same thing for them.

Progressives do not operate this way. We spend way too much time selling each other out, and way too little time having each other’s back. This is especially true within the Democratic Party, where progressives share a political party with another group of people – the corporate neoliberals – who we disagree with on almost every single issue of substance. But within our own movement, there is nothing stopping us from exhibiting the same kind of effective messaging – if we understood the value of coalitions.

A coalition is an essential piece of political organizing. It stems from the basic fact of human life that we are not all the same. We do not have the same political motivations, or care about the same issues with equal weight. Some people are more motivated by social issues, others by economic issues. There is plenty of overlap, thanks to share core values of equality, justice, and empathy. But in a political system such as ours, we can’t do everything at once. Priorities have to be picked, and certain issues will come before others.

How that gets handled is essential to an effective political movement. If one part of the coalition gets everything and the other parts get nothing, then the coalition will break down as those who got nothing will get unhappy, restive, and will eventually leave. Good coalitions understand that everyone has to get their issue taken care of, their goals met – in one way or another – for the thing to hold together.

Conservatives understand this implicitly. The Wednesday meeting is essentially a coalition maintenance session, keeping together what could be a fractious and restive movement. Everyone knows they will get their turn. Why would someone who is primarily motivated by a desire to outlaw abortion support an oil company that wants to drill offshore? Because the anti-choicers know that in a few weeks, the rest of the coalition will unite to defund Planned Parenthood. And a few weeks after that, everyone will come together to appease Wall Street and the billionaires by fighting Elizabeth Warren. And then they’ll all appease the US Chamber by fighting to break a union.

There are underlying values that knit all those things together, common threads that make the communications coherent. But those policies get advanced because their advocates work together to sell the narrative.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is primarily a fiscal conservative. So why would he attack domestic partner benefits? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not an anti-science zealot. So why would he refuse to say if he believes in evolution or creationism? Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported marriage equality and refused to defend Prop 8 in court. So why did he twice veto a bill passed by the state legislature to veto marriage equality?

The answer to the above is simple: because they knew the importance of keeping the coalition together. They know that each part has to be looked after, or else the thing will fall apart as different constituencies turn on the person who failed to advance their agenda.

Members of the conservative coalition do not expect to get everything all at once. An anti-choice advocate would love to overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow. But they don’t get angry when that doesn’t happen in a given year. Not because they are self-disciplined and patient, but because they get important victories year after year that move toward that goal. One year it could be a partial-birth abortion ban. The next year it could be defunding of Planned Parenthood. The year after that it could be a ban on any kind of federal funding of abortions, even indirect. (And in 2011, they’re getting some of these at the same time.)

More importantly, they know that even if their issue doesn’t get advanced in a given year, they also know that the other members of the coalition will not allow them to lose ground. If there’s no way to further restrain abortion rights (Dems control Congress, the voters repeal an insane law like South Dakota’s attempt to ban abortion), fine, the conservative coalition will at least fight to ensure that ground isn’t lost. They’ll unite to fight efforts to rescind a partial-birth abortion ban, or add new funding to Planned Parenthood. Those efforts to prevent losses are just as important to holding the coalition together as are the efforts to achieve policy gains.

Being in the conservative coalition means never having to lose a policy fight – or if you do lose, it won’t be because your allies abandoned you.

This is where the real contrast with the progressive and Democratic coalitions lies. Within the Democratic Party, for example, members of the coalition are constantly told it would be politically reckless to advance their goals, or that they have to give up ground previously won. The implicit message to that member of the coalition is that they don’t matter as much, that their goals or values are less important. That’s a recipe for a weak and ineffectual coalition.

There are lots of examples to illustrate the point. If someone is primarily motivated to become politically active because they oppose war, then telling them to support bombing of Libya in order to be part of the coalition is never, ever going to work. If someone was outraged by torture policies under President Bush, you’ll never get them to believe that torture is OK when President Obama orders it. If someone is motivated by taking action on climate change, then Democrats should probably pass a climate bill instead of abandoning it and instead promoting coal and oil drilling. If someone supports universal health care and wants insurance companies out of the picture, you need to at least give them something (like a public option) if you’re going to otherwise mandate Americans buy private insurance.

The LGBT rights movement offered an excellent example of this. For his first two years in office, not only did President Obama drag his feet on advancing LGBT rights goals, he actively began handing them losses, such as discharging LGBT soldiers under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy or having his Justice Department file briefs in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama argued that he could not advance the policy goals of DADT or DOMA repeal, but even if that were true, he was breaking up his coalition by also handing the LGBT rights movement losses on things like discharges and defending DOMA. It was only when LGBT organizations, activists, and donors threatened to leave the Obama coalition that the White House finally took action to end DADT.

A good coalition recognizes that not everyone is there for the same reason. The “Obama wars” online tend to happen because its participants do not recognize this fact. For a lot of progressives and even a lot of Democrats, re-electing President Obama is not the reason they are in politics. And if Obama has been handing them losses, then appealing to them on the basis of “Obama’s doing the best he can” or “the GOP won’t let him go further” is an argument that they’ll find insulting. This works in reverse. If someone believes that Obama is a good leader, or that even if he isn’t perfect he’s better than any alternative (especially a Republican alternative) then they won’t react well to a criticism of Obama for not attending to this or that progressive policy matter.

Cornel West has basically argued that he is leaving the Obama coalition because Obama turned his back on West’s agenda. That’s a legitimate reaction, whether you agree or not with the words West used to describe what happened. Cornel West won’t sway someone whose primarily political motivation is to defend Obama if he calls Obama a “black mascot” and an Obama defender won’t sway Cornel West if they’re telling West that he’s wrong to expect Obama to deliver on his agenda.

The bigger problem is that it is very difficult to successfully maintain a coalition in today’s Democratic Party. Michael Gerson has identified something I have been arguing for some time – that the Democratic Party is actually two parties artificially melded together. I wrote about this in the California context last fall – today’s Democratic Party has two wings to it. One wing is progressive, anti-corporate, and distrusts the free market. The other wing is neoliberal, pro-corporate, and trusts the free market.

These two wings have antithetical views on many, many things. Neoliberals believe that privatization of public schools is a good idea. Progressives vow to fight that with every bone in their body. Neoliberals believe that less regulation means a healthier economy. Progressives believe that we are in a severe recession right now precisely because of less regulation. Neoliberals believe that corporate power is just fine, progressives see it as a threat to democracy.

The only reason these two antithetical groups share a political party is because the Republicans won’t have either one. The neoliberals tend to be socially liberal – they support civil unions or outright marriage equality, don’t hate immigrants, and know that we share a common ancestor with the chimps. 35 years ago they might have still had a place in the Republican Party, but in the post-Reagan era, they don’t. So they came over to the Democrats, who after 1980 were happy to have as many votes as possible – and whose leaders were uneasy at the growing ranks of dirty hippies among the party base.

As to those progressives, destroying their values and institutions is the reason today’s GOP exists, so they clearly can’t go to that party. They don’t have the money to completely dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do they have the money to start their own political party, and right now they don’t want to, given the widespread belief that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and led to the Bush disaster.

To our north, the neoliberals and progressives do have their own parties. The Canadian election earlier this month gave Conservatives a majority, but it also gave a historic boost to the New Democratic Party, home of Canada’s progressives, while the Liberal Party, home of Canada’s neoliberals, lost half their seats. Those parties have an easier time holding together their coalitions, and that enabled the NDP to break through and become the party that is poised to take power at the next election once Canadians react against Stephen Harper’s extremist agenda.

Still, for a variety of structural, financial, and practical reasons most American progressives are not yet ready to go down the path of starting their own party. And that makes mastery of coalition politics even more important.

Cornel West needlessly personalized things. He would have been on stronger ground had he pointed out, correctly, that Obama has not done a good job of coalition politics. Progressives have not only failed to advance much of their agenda, but are increasingly being told to accept rollbacks, which as we’ve seen doesn’t happen on the other side and is key to holding conservatism together as an effective political force. Obama told unions to accept a tax increase on their health benefits, and promptly lost his filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate in the Massachusetts special election. While Republicans are facing a big political backlash for actually turning on members of their coalition – for the first time in a long time – by proposing to end Medicare, Obama risks alienating more of his coalition by promoting further austerity. Civil libertarians have seen loss after loss under Obama (which explains clearly why Glenn Greenwald does not feel any need to defend Obama). Obama has consistently sided with the banks and has done nothing to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Hardly anybody has been prosecuted for the crimes and fraud at the heart of Wall Street during the 2000s boom.

There’s no doubt that any Democratic president faces a difficult task in holding together a political coalition made up of two groups – progressives and neoliberals – who distrust each other and are in many ways fighting each other over the basic economic issues facing this country. But Obama has not made much effort to keep progressives on his side. He halfheartedly advocated for their goals, did some things to roll back progressive gains and values, and expects progressives to remain in the coalition largely out of fear of a Republican presidency. That’s a legitimate reason to stay, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t work for everybody, and nobody should be surprised when some progressives walk. Everyone has their limit.

It has been clear that Obama is of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. He always was (and so too was Hillary Clinton). It’s far easier for a neoliberal Democrat to win over just enough progressives to gain the party presidential nomination than vice-versa. Progressives are debating amongst themselves whether it makes sense to stay in that coalition if the terms are, as they have been since the late 1970s, subservience to a neoliberal agenda. I do not expect that debate to end anytime soon.

What we can do – and what we must do – is ensure that within the progressive coalition, we DO practice good coalitional behavior. If we are going to stay inside the Democratic Party, then we have to overcome the neoliberal wing. To do that, we have to be a disciplined and effective coalition. And to do that, we have to have each other’s back. We have to attend to each other’s needs. We have to recognize that everyone who wants to be in the coalition has a legitimate reason to be here, and has legitimate policy goals. If we have different goals – if Person A cares most about ending the death penalty, if Person B cares most about reducing carbon emissions, and if Person C cares most about single-payer health care, we have to make sure everyone not only gets their turn, but also make sure that each does not have to suffer a loss at our hands. If we find that we have goals that are in conflict, then we have to resolve that somehow.

One thing is clear: no coalition has ever succeeded with one part telling the other that their values are flawed, that they are wrong to want what they want, that they are wrong to be upset when they don’t get something. We are not going to change people’s values, and we should not make doing so the price of admission to a coalition. Unless we want to. In which case we have to accept the political consequences. I’d be happy to say we will never, and must never, coalition with neoliberals. But that has political consequences that many other progressives find unacceptable.

If we are going to address the severe crisis that is engulfing our country, we need to become better at building and maintaining coalitions. That means we have to decide who we want in the coalition, how we will satisfy their needs, and what price to maintain the coalition is too high to pay. Those are necessary, even essential political practices. It’s time we did that, rather than beating each other over the head for not seeing things exactly the way we do ourselves.

Only then will be become the disciplined and effective operation that we want.

Washington Post’s The Fix looks at a Pew poll of independent voters in The misunderstood independent,

In politics, it’s often tempting to put independents somewhere in the middle of Republicans and Democrats, politically. They identify somewhere in between the two, so they must be moderates, right?

A new study from the Pew Research Center suggests that’s not so true anymore. Independents, in fact, are a fast-growing and increasingly diverse group that both parties are going to need to study and understand in the years ahead.

. . . Pew identifies three different kinds of independents. Libertarians and Disaffecteds are 21 percent of registered voters and lean towards Republicans; Post-Moderns are 14 percent and lean towards Democrats.

A look at their views on issues shows those three groups can often be among the most extreme on a given topic.

Disaffecteds, for example, believe in helping the needy more than most Democrats. Libertarians side with business more than even the solidly Republican Staunch Conservatives. And Post-Moderns accept homosexuality more than most Democrats. The three independents groups are also less religious, on the whole, than either Republicans or most Democrats.

In the post I wrote last year, The Elusive “Swing” Vote, I wrote about this idea of a “swing” voter, (note I should have written “few” voters switch instead of flatly saying none),

Have you heard of the “Moveable Middle?” This is the idea that there are voters on the left who will always vote on the left, and voters on the right, who will always vote on the right, and then there are voters between them who switch back and forth. They are called “swing voters.”

So the idea in politics is that in order to win elections you have to take positions that appeal to these voters, and they will “switch” and vote for you instead of for the other side. This is a fundamental mistake.

Here is what is very important to understand about the “swing” vote: No voters “switch.” That is the wrong lesson. There are not voters who “swing” there are left voters and right voters in this middle segment who either show up and vote or do not show up and vote, and this causes this “swing” segment to swing.

The lesson to learn: You have to deliver for YOUR part of that swing segment or they don’t show up and vote for you. That is what makes the segment “swing.”

That post looked at polling by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee that reached conclusions similar to this more recent Pew polling.

So I’ve been saying that Dem pollsters are using the wrong model of what an independent voter is, telling the politicians that there is a “block” of independents who will vote one way or the other depending on what they hear. With this model they have to “move to the center” always staying in “between” the position of liberals and the far right, hoping to “attract” these voters away from the other side. They describe a single “center” or “independent voter” who will vote one way or another depending on whether they thing a candidate is “in between” the two poles, even when those poles have been moved very far to the right.

The problem here is the effect the metaphor of a “center” has on our thinking. Thinking about independent voters as being a “block” that is “between” the parties is the problem. It forces the brain into a constraint because of the visual image that it evokes. What I mean is that the actual language of “centrist” changes how we think. The metaphor makes us think they are “between” something called left and right. And as a result it forces certain conclusions.

The PCCC and now the Pew poll show us that these “independent” voters are NOT some group that sits between the positions of the parties. They are not a block and they are not between. Democrats and especially their pollsters think of them as a block that is between, and this is why the do what they do.

Karl Rove believed that there were independents who were not registered Republican because the party was not far enough to the right for them, who would only turn out if the party gave them something to vote for. I think Karl Rove’s model is more accurate, that the independent voters are a number of groups, and very large numbers of them are MORE to the left or right than the parties, and don’t vote unless the parties appeal enough to them.

Rove decided this means the Republicans need to move ever more to the right, and this will cause those “independent” voters who had changed their affiliation out of disgust with the centrism of their party to now turn out and vote.

I think Rove nailed it. the PCCC had a poll a while back that showed this, and now see below. Dems have it exactly wrong, what they are doing turns off those independents who might have turned out to vote for them.

The way to grow your voting base is NOT to try to “appeal” to some group that is not left or right, but is “between” something called left and right. To get more voters — especially the “independent” ones who won’t identify with a party — is to take stands, be more committed to progressive positions, and to articulate them more clearly.

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.

All of which is to say, there has been far more and far deeper continuity between Bush and Obama than there has been any sort of fundamental change. As is to be expected on the national security/state secrets front, Glenn Greenwald has already penned two excellent posts on this matter, “WH forces P.J. Crowley to resign for condemning abuse of Manning” on Sunday and “The clarifying Manning/Crowley controversy” today.

Rather than rehash any of the considerable territory that he has already covered, I want to hone in on an underlying question that I feel he somewhat glosses over due to his own ideological orientation. (Glenn often gives the impression it’s apparently unsurprising hypocrisy ala “both sides do it”.) That is the question of why and how Obama continues to get by with so little criticism and opposition from his activist and voter base. It’s not that people are entirely silent, but that critical voices who do exist have not made a meaningful impact on the broader mass of activists and/or voters. Obama continues to be perceived more as a liberal than a centrist, and liberals continue to support him disproportionately, despite his clearly center-right policies, not just on national security, but across a broad range of policy areas, including such central ones as economic and foreign policy, on both of which he is well to the right of Bush Sr. and relatively close to Bush Jr.

As Greenwald himself reminds us in several instances, there is a particularly striking disonnect between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his actual governing practice:

It’s long been obvious that the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers “comes from the President himself,” notwithstanding his campaign decree — under the inspiring title “Protect Whistleblowers” — that “such acts of courage and patriotism should be encouraged rather than stifled.” …. Other than Obama’s tolerance for the same detainee abuse against which he campaigned and his ongoing subservience to the military that he supposedly “commands,” it is the way in which this Manning/Crowley behavior bolsters the regime of secrecy and the President’s obsessive attempts to destroy whistleblowing that makes this episode so important and so telling.

And:

Elsewhere, The Philadelphia Daily News‘ progressive columnist Will Bunch accuses Obama of “lying” during the campaign by firing Crowley and endorsing “the bizarre and immoral treatment of the alleged Wikileaks leaker.” In The Guardian, Obama voter Daniel Ellsberg condemns “this shameful abuse of Bradley Manning,” arguing that it “amounts to torture” and “makes me feel ashamed for the [Marine] Corps,” in which Ellsberg served three years, including nine months at Quantico.

This immediately struck a chord with me, since one of the more noteworthy findings of Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler was that Obama voters during the primary were considerable more non-authoritarian than Clinton voters. (Greenwald himself called this “a certain-to-be-controversial chapter” in the book.)

To understand what’s going on here, I think one other factor that Hetherington and Weiler draw attention to needs to be considered, concerning what is most salient about authoritarianism. Quoting from a passage in the book that I quoted in my own comments as part of the TPMCafe discussion of the book:

Our treatment places a need for order at the center. Much emerging work in cognitive science depicts a struggle in all humans to achieve clarity in the face of confusion. To use terms more often used by social scientists, people hope to impose order on ambiguous situations….

Thinking about authoritarianism in terms of order rather than authority itself also helps explain why those scoring high are more inclined to simplify the world into black and white categories while those scoring lower in authoritarianism feel more comfortable with shades of gray. Black and white categories provide order. So, too, does a propensity to submit to authorities, but only to those who promise a black and white understanding of the world. Authoritarians do not view Barack Obama as the same type of authority as, say, George W. Bush. Hence it is not so much the submission that is important but rather a preference for concreteness that is important.

Bush’s language was the very essence of concreteness, as well as dividing the world strakly into black and white. Obama’s language was quite the opposite. And yet, as soon as Obama took power, his actions began paralleling Bush’s actions, rather than his own rhetoric. The reason for this can be seen as quite pedestrian, tracing back to an underlying consistency: Even from the beginnings of Obama’s campaign, he was very concerned about controlling the message and maintianing the discipline of his campaign–arguably even obsessively so. He even managed to convince major donors and outside organizations to silence themselves and allow his campaign virtually exclusive message control over everything coming from the Democratic side.

Thus, even as the campaign encouraged vigorous discussion and “bottom-up input” in its online fora, this had virtually no role in the broader campaign. It could even be seen as a way of allowing supports to ‘let off steam’ so as not to get in the way of the “grownups”. Indeed, within weeks of taking power, Obama completely dispensed with taking any notice of such input, first rejecting calls for holding Bush/Cheney war criminals accountable, then mocking his own supporters for calling for the decriminalization of marijuana.

It’s often been noted that Obama seems to care more about process than end results, and so it’s completely consistent for his own authoritarian bent to emerge almost effortlessly out of his organizational penchant for a smoothly-running machine. For him, much more than Bush or Cheney, it’s the order side of things that drives his authoritarianism, even though the black-and-white categories he ends up embracing are not rooted in anything deeper than the backroom political battles inside his own administration.

Most of his liberal supporters still have yet to catch on precisely because Obama’s authoritarianism comes out of left field for them–not just from a purported “liberal” who even now uses more sophisticated language most of the time, but from someone motivated more by a bureaucrtic need for control in line with battles waged behind closed doors along lines that are often being fluidly redrawn according to criteria that are difficult for non-partipant to follow. Of course, participants and active critics see things quite differently. The numerous parallels between Bush and Obama that Greenwald draws attention to are anything but obscure to active, engaged critics. But decades of research tell us quite clearly that the mass public doesn’t read politics based on this sort of information. Obama’s manner–as well as his most prominent critics–continus to reinforce his appearance as a non-authoritarian, carefully considering and balancing a wide range of factors.

The big picture take-away here is that authoritarianism has gained such a pervasive foothold among the American ruling class that it is no longer even possible for a substantively non-authoritarian political position, actor, organization or movement to be recognized as such. Non- (or even anti-)authoritarian spoofs, set-pieces and fantasies by authoritarian actors of one stripe or another have completely taken over the roles of their authentically anti-authoritarian counterparts, and this is every bit as true of Obama as it is of the Tea Party, however much they may differ from one another in any number of other ways.

When a genuinely non-authoritarian movement arises–such as the mass opposition to Walkers’ Wisconsin coup–the political elites are completely flummoxed by it, and aside from falling back on hackneyed authoritarian-projection stereotypes of “union thugs” and “union bosses” they have literally nothing to say, and consequently simply decide not to cover what they cannot understand.

This, then, is the deeper sense in which the Manning/Crowly Affair reveals the fact that truth is not an option in American political life today.

Before going forward, I want to talk about the basic principles that will guide my series of posts and my commentary:

-Social Security is something that the people are entitled to, both by law and by basic human rights.

-Social Security is a successful program that took the senior population in the U.S. from one of the poorest groups of seniors in the world to one of the wealthiest.

-Social Security does not add to the deficit, not one cent. It has a dedicated revenue stream.

-There is no Social Security crisis. There is a potential partial shortfall in nearly 30 years and no problem with the program in the present.

-Draconian cuts and significant changes do not need to be made to the program. Ever.

-The solution to the potential problems with Social Security involve increasing revenues, not in making cuts.

-I oppose all cuts in benefits, raising the retirement age, cutting cost of living adjustments and the privatization of Social Security.

-Social Security benefits are already modest and cuts would cause damage to the most vulnerable seniors.

-Social Security is particularly important to minorities and suggestions that minorities get a “bad deal” from Social Security ignore facts and are based on a significant misinterpretation of statistics.

-Any support by Democratic politicians for any cuts or privatization of Social Security is a disasterous idea that will not only hurt Americans, it will be an electoral disaster.

So, I will start doing story and commentary roundups tomorrow, with these premises as my guide…