Analystas

One sobering development, though, should make British citizens sit up and take notice. For that matter, those of us in America and in every other democracy in the world (to the extent that the US can be called a democracy) need to be paying very close attention to the latest move by Brit Prime Minister David Cameron, who is calling on Parliament to consider enacting social media bans.

Amid continuing rioting in multiple cities across the U.K., British Prime Minister David Cameron said in Parliament that legislators should consider laws allowing officials to ban individuals from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, if there is a chance those individuals intend to use the sites to plot violence. Cameron’s proposal, coming as thousands of British police attempt to reestablish order in blighted inner cities, acknowledges the central role played by social media in initiating, organizing, and spreading civil disorder — but immediately drew criticism as a misguided over-reaction, which does nothing to address the real causes of the violence.

Cameron told lawmakers that home secretary Theresa May will meet with executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Research In Motion, which makes Blackberry devices, to determine the feasibility of a social media ban on miscreants. This could include banning individuals who have already used social media to plan violence, and constant monitoring of social media to spot (and preempt) new episodes of violence in the planning phases.

Cameron explained to Parliament: “Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

There’s more at The Guardian.

Now, at a glance, there’s not a lot here to scare a dedicated law-and-order type. We’re just talking about cutting off miscreants, right? And no, I don’t think thugs and looters have any particular right to advanced technology in the pursuit of criminal activity.

The problem is that this only works if you trust the government when it comes to defining the terms. I mean, instead of the UK and Cameron (whom we trust because they’re a lot like us) let’s imagine if this had come from former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as the Arab Spring was collapsing around his ears. Imagine if it were Moammar Gaddhafi or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (who’s currently in the process of stomping the shit out of his own protesters) insisting on a meeting with Facebook, Twitter and RIM. Imagine if there were enough North Koreans who haven’t been starved to death to work up a good riot – how would we feel if it were Kim Jong-Il instead of Cameron?

Most of us have a clear enough idea in our heads about the difference between a democratic protester and a criminal. Or, at least, we think we do. Usually, though, the difference can be quickly inferred from a basic look at who we support politically. History has taught us that the distinction between “freedom fighters” and “death squads” is often one of perspective.

So how, then, do we receive Cameron’s agitation for a social media smackdown? Is he an honest man looking to address the tools of common street crime? Or is he a hegemon looking for means of tamping down political protest that has boiled over in the wake of the failure of government policies?

Many Americans probably can’t fathom our leader, President Barack Obama, even contemplating such a move. Of course, once upon a time we wouldn’t have conceived of backscat security porn machines, granny shakedowns, diaper searches and gate-rape at our airports. Telecom carriers colluding with the NSA to spy on average citizens would have been unthinkable. The Patriot Act would have sparked a call to the barricades. Now we learn about the goddamned Super Patriot Act, which smells like a Soviet version of Dean Wormer’s double-secret probation activities against Delta House. And of course, we have to acknowledge that, pretty campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Obama has expanded Bush-era affronts to our freedom, and we might also note that the roiling field of GOP probables looking to challenge a very vulnerable Obama in 2012 features precisely zero candidates known for their commitment to civil liberties.

At this point, perhaps the question isn’t whether the US government might contemplate shutting off social media in times of unrest. The better question might be whether they already have and this is where Cameron got the idea. Heck, is it possible that Cameron is, in part, floating a friendly trial balloon for his friends in DC? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it’s been a long time since our government did anything on the civil liberties front to earn a presumption of innocence.

Given the direction our economy is heading and the zeal with which both parties are willing to collaborate against the middle and working classes in order to protect the financial interests of large corporations and our wealthiest citizens, it’s also not unreasonable to wonder whether the riots in the UK might be a foreshadowing of things to come over here. Which is to say, this is anything but idle navel-gazing.

And now, for the knee-buckling irony part of the discussion. What if we were to develop some street-level unrest in the US? And what if the government were to seek to shut down the social media channels being employed by organizers (or, for the sake of argument, let’s say they just moved to shut it down for everybody, you know, just until order was restored – and really, restoring order is all that Assad is looking to do, right)? Who would stand up for the cause of free speech?

Well, Google is a Fortune 100. Facebook is pretty big. RIM is smaller and dying, but still they have some heft. With a market valuation of $4 billion or better Twitter is nothing to sneeze at. And these companies represent a certain degree of influence where our political landscape is concerned. So they might be expected, in the name of shareholder value, to go to the mat in defense of their customers.

Or they might fold like a cheap lawn chair. Who knows. But they’d be the only potential dissenters whose voices had a hope of mattering.

Stay tuned. This one has the potential to get interesting. You know, interesting in the sense of “may you live in interesting times…”

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.

The informed reply goes something like this:

1. The crisis isn’t real. It’s been fabricated by the neo-liberal politicians whose goal is to eliminate all taxes on rich people and bust structures like unions that afford the non-hyper-wealthy with some leverage in the American political economy. It. Isn’t. Real.
2. You’re blaming the wrong people. To the extent that I accept arguments that we do need to cut spending (and I do, by the way – read on), whatever problems we do actually have are the direct result of Republican taxation policies.

So, for the sake of argument let’s say America has a serious financial problem. How would I solve it? Well, I’m no economist, but here are some ideas:

1. Eliminate Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s well over $300B right there. That would pay 1.4 million teachers for five years, ballpark. You know, since teachers are such an ungodly drain on the economy.
2. Get out of Iraq. There’s another $100B per year. And then get out of the military adventure business for good. Right now the US spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, and there’s no moral, ethical or economic excuse for it.
3. Take a chain saw to waste in the military budget. Things like the F-22 Osprey, which has already wasted $22B and will likely cost another $75B to finish. By the way, it’s unclear that the damned thing will actually work, and once you get past the contractors and their pet Congressweasels nobody seems to want it.
4. Let’s have a good, hard look at the corporate tax code, because ExxonMobil, GE, BoA, Chevron, Boein, Valero, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ConocoPhillips and Carnival Cruise Lines combined to pay damned near no taxes, despite often-record revenues. In fact, between tax credits, refunds and bailouts, these companies hit us up for trillions of dollars in the past year or two. I’m not accusing any of these companies of breaking the law, and the way the laws work they’re actually required to behave in this way. All I’m saying is, you know, you earn billions and billions in profit, maybe the tax code should be structured so that you pay your fair share in taxes. That’s all.

Once we’ve done these things, then let’s see where we are.

I know, I’m just a simple country boy. And I didn’t major in math by any stretch. But it looks to me like this plan has us up over a trillion dollars in five years (maybe a whole lot sooner, depending on how we parse item #4).

From where I sit, it just doesn’t seem right to go after the little guy first just so we can make sure that Charlie Sheen, Paris Hilton and the Koch brothers can have a tax cut.

Conceptually, humanitarian intervention is a rather beautiful thing. State sovereignty had been seen as absolute for 350 years, but then the universal human rights  regime emerged and the idea took hold that a state’s responsibility to defend its people trumped its right to territorial sovereignty. When a state massacres its people rather than protecting them, the human family, working through broadly legitimate international institutions, would intervene, militarily if need be, to spare the vulnerable. This has become known as the “responsibility to protect,” and you can read all about it here (PDF).

As one who believes in this principle, I can’t say that I “oppose” the no-fly zone established over Libya. The country offers a rather clear-cut example of a despotic government poised to massacre thousands of its own, and here is the international community responding forcefully to spare their lives. Perhaps it will be a text-book example of the “responsibility to protect” in action.

I imagine that most of those who “oppose” the action would like nothing more than to have their skepticism be proven to be unfounded.

At the same time, there is every reason to be deeply cynical about the prospects of success. Because while the principlesunderlying humanitarian intervention are well developed, the institutions charged with implementing them are certainly not.

For those of us who have long argued to develop those institutions more fully, this no-fly zone creates distinctly mixed feelings. Under the circumstances, doing nothing would not only be profoundly irresponsible, it would also violate our core belief in the imperative of respecting essential human rights. Yet, having studied our history, we also know that the potential for unintended consequences — for a bad situation to be turned into something worse — are real, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, or due to wishful thinking.

Books have been written about the challenges of humanitarian intervention, but here’s a very quick-and-dirty summary of three of the most daunting.

1) Mission creep

I wrote yesterday that limited interventions — with promises that the goals will be limited and, in the case of no-fly zones and naval embargoes, that no ground troops will be deployed — are like a “gateway drug” leading all-too-easily to expanded conflict. This is an institutional reality — the Security Council states are now invested in this conflict, but there is no reason to be confident Gaddhafi’s regime will fall quickly. As the saying goes: “in for a penny, in for a pound” — having entered the conflict, the temptation to escalate our involvement — to add “regime change” and “state-building” to the agenda — is going to be difficult for the Security Council to resist.

You can go through the history of multilateral interventions — from Korea through Somalia (but not really in Rwanda!) — and what you’ll find in virtually every case is not a single Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, but a series of them authorizing ever-greater military involvement in the conflict. This reality cannot be ignored.

2) Insufficient resources

If the mission creeps — or, if it drags on — then history also suggests that we’re likely to end up with the worst of both worlds: a broad mandate coupled with insufficient resources to do the job right.

This is almost always the case in the UN system, which has no independent source of funding and must rely on the dues and pledges of its member states to undertake any action. It’s the same whether you want to talk about humanitarian intervention or relief from famine, drought or natural disaster. At the beginning, with shocking footage of rebel forces being massacred, children starving or tsunamis hitting the beach flashing across the world’s TV screens, it’s easy to commit all kinds of resources to help. But these actions are costly, and those resources have to be authorized by domestic legislatures. And it’s not just the money at stake — national governments also have to deal with all manner of domestic and international political calculations.

In the case of military interventions, under-funding can lead to disastrous results, with the most obvious example being the horrific failure of UNAMIR leading up to and during the Rwanda Genocide.

3) Politicization

Finally, the nature of the UN decision-making process itself is a huge challenge to these kinds of interventions being viewed as legitimate. Central to the “responsibility to protect” concept is that it is based on an imperative to uphold certain basic human rights, and not on international political (or economic) considerations. So the entire venture rests on the decision of when and where to intervene being made in some relatively apolitical fashion. In the real world, of course, given that the power of the Security Council, and thus the entire United Nations system, rests in the hands of the 5 permanent, veto-wielding members — the most powerful states, each with its own internal and external politics to manage — this is impossible to achieve.

That an intervention be widely perceived as legitimate is not just some abstract academic issue. Combatants are far less likely to engage in the political process that must always accompany such actions if they view them as prettied-up acts of neo-colonialism or cover for other, more powerful states’ agendas.

So, again, many who oppose — or are at least skeptical of humanitarian intervention — support it in theory, and have long argued for reforms that might address these issues.

Security Council reform — gradually phasing out the veto power enjoyed by “permanent 5,” or providing a mechanism to override a veto — has been a long-time goal of human rights activists. But, as you might imagine, the P-5 have fought it tooth-and-nail.

There have also long been calls for a dedicated and independent UN intervention force, which wouldn’t rest on the ad-hoc pledges of UN member states. Similarly, reformers have long argued that an independent funding mechanism for UN actions — both military and humanitarian — must be created through some variation of the “Lula Fund” or “Tobin tax.”

A final but important note: anyone who holds an idealized view of “clean” and “precise” modern warfare is simply deluded. As of this writing, there are reports of US cruise missiles being fired at targets in densely packed Tripoli, and French fighters engaging “regime tanks” on the ground. Despite being widely portrayed by the media as a UN air patrol designed to deny the regime’s forces the capacity to wipe out their enemies from above, Western powers are dropping munitions on Libya. Make no mistake: innocents will die. There will be “collateral damage” — it’s the nature of the game, and that can’t be ignored.

Rather than “opposing the no-fly zone,” I find myself deeply conflicted. Hopefully, it will work exactly as promised — lives will be spared, opposition forces will be emboldened and the Libyan regime will crumble under the pressure of international isolation. Hopefully, the skeptics among us will be proven wrong.

But it’s important to understand that the history of these adventures, no matter how well intentioned, doesn’t provide much cause for optimism. And one doesn’t have to be an “isolationist” to see that.

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.

This declaration resonated especially strong with public school teachers and anyone connected to the education community who knew all too well from day-to-day observations that everyone is “part of a larger community that can help or hurt our best efforts” to raise healthy, motivated, and morally-centered children. Every day of their professional lives, teachers see students whose best efforts are frequently undone by societal ills that surround them – households broken by debt and health calamities, unsafe streets and playgrounds, governing systems that care more about perpetuating the power of certain individuals than advancing the public well being.

Now fast forward to 2011 and the Democratic party leadership currently occupying the White House, and what we see is an exhortation of a completely different kind. Instead of calls for collective action and shared responsibility for children, what we see instead is a party committed to competition.

President Obama has staked out an obligation to “win the future” and has made his Education Secretary’s “Race to the Top” the hood ornament of his ed policy vehicle. Despite the fact that the grants rewarded from Race to the Top have only just begun and we don’t have any results yet, Obama called this winners-take-all approach to governing “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.”

The purported magic of this Race is to force states to adopt specific education “reforms”– primarily, charter schools and merit pay for teachers based on student test scores – in order to fund initiatives aimed at improving schools, especially those serving mostly poor kids. And it must be noted that hardly anyone – even ardent backers of the so-called reforms – likes the results of the Race, and most view the whole affair as a way to “push through an agenda that otherwise would likely not get voter or public approval.”

What happened in the past 15 years? What moved the leadership of the Democratic party from collectivist calls to our moral responsibilities toward children to cold, technocratic contests for cash?

Certainly when you look at the other side of the political coin, you don’t see a similar transformation. After Ms. Clinton’s declaration for “a village” approach to education policy, the Republican opposition at that time, represented by Senator Bob Dole, dismissed her kind of thinking as a “collective excuse.” His insistence, back in 1996, for “individual accountability” as the only means to achieving progress is in seamless agreement with today’s leadership in the Republican party.

Regardless of how you may feel about the Obama administration’s proposals for children and education, this profound change in philosophy and rhetoric emanating from his party’s leadership is an undeniable fact. And as Democrats abdicated a collectivists stand for children and shifted to the paradigm of competition for cash, Republicans kept singing the same chorus. So how’d that happen?

What happened was, in the education debate in particular and arguably in the broad policy arena at large, the leaders of the Democratic party not only bungled their political strategy, they also lost the courage of their convictions. In fact, if you want to get an enlightened view of the Democratic party’s strategic and moral failure over the past 30 years, the arc of the education debate in America provides you with a spectacular ringside seat.

Back in simpler times, when adversarial politics was considered the norm and not every representative in DC cowered behind the mantle of “bipartisanship,” the Republicans in the Reagan administration backed an agenda of vouchers, school prayer, and abolishing the department of education. President Reagan’s antipathy toward teachers unions and the bussing of school kids for racial integration was famous. And in 1983, his educator-bashing Secretary of Ed. Terrell Bell gave conservatives the perfect weapon to bash away at public schools for generations to come: a report called A Nation at Risk.

Back then, the Democrats actually mustered some opposition to the conservative onslaught. “Congress killed his major school choice initiatives, rejected several of his proposed cuts to school programs, and successfully fought off his plans to disband the Education Department.”

What rapidly ensued after the adversarial Reagan years was that the neoliberals descended on DC and the “Washington Consensus” became the governing paradigm.

As edu-nihilist Frederick Hess has pointed out, the Washington consensus on education took a unique form that would foretell not only the direction of the Democratic party but also reveal its idealistic undoing at the hands of the savvier Republican leadership.

According to Hess, the Washington Consensus on education was primarily guided by three principles: “First, that the nation’s foremost education objective should be closing racial and economic achievement gaps. Second, that excellent schools can overcome the challenges of poverty. And third, that external pressure and tough accountability are critical components of helping school systems improve.”

It was this Washington Consensus that resulted in the landmark No Child Left Behind legislation that still governs education policy today. The consensus, however, was flawed in a number of ways. To begin with, it was not the result of any bottom-up democratic process, but instead a matter of deal-making among elites in politics and business. And second, it wasn’t really a consensus.

For while the Republicans conceded almost nothing – the legislation was adored by big business and irritated only the local control advocates in the party – the Democrats conceded just about everyone in their base who was connected to public education. As most of the nations 3 million + public school teachers fumed at the mandates of NCLB, more and more parents began to experience how the mandates were disrupting their children’s education and degrading neighborhood schools.

So for Republicans, NCLB was a strategic tour de force. And while Democrats continued to sell this neoliberal snake oil under the mantle of “rescuing poor kids” (something that Republicans have never been much interested in), their political base degenerated further into conflict.

But much more than just a strategic blunder, the Democratic party’s leadership on education policy is symbolic of its complete and utter moral failure. Sticking educators and schools with the lone responsibility of overcoming poverty – again, something Republicans have never shown much interest in – is a cop-out of the first order. And erecting grand schemes of rewards and punishments for coercing educators without placing any responsibilities on more powerful sectors of our country, such as big corporations and wealthy individuals, is cowardly.

Can anyone witnessing the debacle of the Democratic party’s leadership on education be at all surprised at seeing it sell out in other policy areas, such as healthcare (individual mandates with no public option), the economic collapse (bail outs for big banks with anemic jobs programs), and the nation’s debt (tax breaks for millionaires while people making less than $20,000 get a tax increase).

Now what we see is the Democratic leadership still wedded to the evil spawn of NCLB which is Race to the Top. And we’re now being sold a bright and shiny “New Washington Consensus” that promises, in a nutshell, to allow local politicians to ease up on well-funded schools in the leafy suburbs while school children in dilapidated urban districts and abandoned rural tracts continue to feel the strong arm of our expanding plutocracy.

In the past month we’ve seen amazing turnouts of public outrage in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere as the Democratic party’s leaders in DC continue to dither with the Republican on charades like Race to the Top. And now that the village is in flames, maybe the villagers are about to revolt.