Here is something no one has told you before.
All the political energy of 2010 is a rush to the left.
Wall Street and Washington lobbyists like Dick Armey thought they could contain the Tea Party, and channel it to their corporatist ends, but they are having less luck with that than BP is having with the oil spill.
People like Rand Paul and Sarah Palin, whatever their strengths and weaknesses might be on governing, are actually leftist radicals who aim to transform both business and government, who have no patience for conserving business as usual.
The difference between them and the Netroots is their choice of weapon. Ideology. It's a blunt instrument that, unlike reform, usually destroys those who wield it.
Both Paul and Palin define the change they want to see in terms of absolutes. Government must not do this. Government must do that. Always, immutable. Once and for all. It's either in the Constitution or must be placed there, so boundaries can be drawn no one will ever be able to cross. It is a childlike leftism, right out of the 1930s.
I don't think the above description is unfair to either of them, or to their supporters. But the idea of immutability, of permanence, of absolute, is a radical notion to most Americans. It is a faith in words rather than a faith in man, and it's gaining traction because man is fallible — whether they're at Goldman Sachs, BP, or behind a desk in the White House.
Or course some faith in absolutism always appears in America at times of great stress. The difference is that, in the past, right-wing demagogues did put their faith in people, that is the right people. It is what drove the Wallace legions in the Nixon era, it's what drove the Populists early last century, it's what drove the South, not just against Lincoln but under Andrew Jackson. Its roots are deep within Jeffersonism, in organized distrust of any large institution, and a naive faith in a world that does not exist.
The utopia of Paul and Palin never existed. That is, when words were interpreted as they now wish we were not a more perfect union. It didn't exist 50 years ago, in America's suburbs. It did not exist 110 years ago on the Populists' farms, nor did it exist 160 years ago in the antebellum South. It didn't exist because it denied full humanity to blacks and women and immigrants and gays. Their utopia was everyone else's dystopia. Their freedom was everyone else's oppression.
Against this has always stood the clear words of the preamble, and its call to human actors. Three big words, bolder and brighter than any others. But tied to a higher calling, to actual governing, with all its human faults and risks.
This is not a suicide pact:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It is a document of ordered liberty. There can be no liberty without order, only chaos.
When Paul and Palin defend their view of the document they wind up quoting not from its authors or their advocates in the Federalist Papers, but as Garry Wills noted their opponents, the men who wrote the Anti-Federalist Papers.
Madison, Jay, and Hamilton advocated for the new government as an instrument of unity, powerful enough on which to establish banks, to build canals, to organize and maintain a great economy.
Did they see the complex world of 2010? No. But they built something that could live inside it, a republic if its people would keep it. We have done that down the centuries, with the blood of our soldiers and the treasure of generations, but also with our legislators and our law courts. And we have learned in that process that a hero is not a great man on a pedestal, but an ordinary man or woman called to do great things by circumstance, despite their fear.
Or as the song American Anthem teaches:
Know each quiet act of dignity is that which fortifies the soul of a nation that will never die.
All this holds great lessons for our current President. He must get in front of this rush to the left if the center is to hold.
At times of great trial, great leaders do not triangulate, nor do they equivocate. They are not Nixon. They are Lincoln. They are not McKinley. They are Roosevelt. Which means they move forward boldly, accepting animus more in sorrow than in anger. Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received. (The man in the portrait, according to Albert Kaplan, who bought it and copyrighted it, is Abraham Lincoln, in 1843.)
Washington has never understood this. New York has never understood it. The Beltway and Wall Street have always seen power as a transaction, and in ordinary times it is. But in extraordinary times it is something completely different, it is a struggle to which the people must be called and engaged in.
The problem Barack Obama faces is that he has a transactional Administration in a transformational time, and he must transform it. He needs to fire Ken Salazar and either unleash Carol Browner or find someone who can be unleashed at the EPA. He needs to demand Congress pass all his agenda — including immigration reform and the climate bill — and run against those Democrats who won't move forward. He needs to tell the Pentagon who the Commander in Chief is, fire those who won't obey orders, demand adherence to his timelines and get our troops home.
This man is the best writer we've had in the White House since Lincoln, and we need him now. He is our greatest master of media since Roosevelt and we need him to stand for something. He needs to be seen as commanding, setting his course into the wind, defying both his critics and all who would compromise in the name of expediency.
This is the answer to Paul and Palin, as it was the answer to Wallace and McCarthy, to Father Coughlin and Huey Long, to Thomas F. Watson, to the Klan, to the Confederacy itself.
It is the call to principle, to the better angels of our nature. It's what the Netroots have been demanding of the President this year, demanding with their votes, demanding with their energy, demanding with their words, demanding even with their apathy. In times of crisis business as usual won't do. Choices must be made, and meaningful reform must come to render our union more perfect.
Make this the choice, and if Congress doesn't pass your agenda you will get a better Congress, not a worse one. Because the people know we need to move forward rapidly in an American direction, that we're drowning in ambiguity.
When given the choice, we also know that no certainty can save us, and that the power must be in our hands, not dead words or absolutes.
Dana, you are a pleasure to read; cool, measured and on- point. Thanks.
Dana, you are a pleasure to read; cool, measured and on- point. Thanks.
“All the political energy of 2010 is a rush to the left.”
That seems to be the definite proof of just seeing what you want to see.
Hint: look at the election results after Obama got elected. Look at the tea party movement. The left has got nothing to show for it – well, except for multiplying the deficit and mortgaging our grandchildren of course. And of course continuing to legalize the murdering of unborn human beings.
🙂
“All the political energy of 2010 is a rush to the left.”
That seems to be the definite proof of just seeing what you want to see.
Hint: look at the election results after Obama got elected. Look at the tea party movement. The left has got nothing to show for it – well, except for multiplying the deficit and mortgaging our grandchildren of course. And of course continuing to legalize the murdering of unborn human beings.
🙂