4f08fc78f3516822f7e6e1fe1747a955.jpgA Political Handbook for Post Bush America

Eric Alterman helped to create my awareness of modern politics. His book, What Liberal Media, along with Blinded by the Right, the Clinton Wars, and Before the Storm, taught me more about the political system and how it really worked than anything I had ever read.

Alterman helped me understand coalitions, modern media politics, and the right-wing, and I am forever indebted to his brilliant and brave intellectual arguments. What Alterman excels at is chronicling the structural lies embedded in our media and society that undermine liberal politics. He did this with What Liberal Media, where he systematically deconstructed the idea that the press is liberal, and did this in 2003.

The ‘So Called Liberal Media’, or SCLM for short, was a term he invented and used to great effect, such that is is now conventional wisdom in Democratic activist circles and among Democratic elites that the media has certain biases, but liberalism is not one of them. It is this intellectual work that led to, among others, the Fox News debate fight, the organizing against Nedra Pickler, and the understanding of how swiftboating operates.amazon.gif

I was surprised that his latest book, Why We’re Liberals: A Handbook for Post-Bush America, confused me. It’s a compendium of attacks on liberals, from his entire chapter on why liberals are not considered patriotic, with a useful analysis of the arguments conservatives have made about our relationship with the military and why those arguments are incorrect. He systematically goes through the litany of conservative arguments about liberalism, that we’re gay hippy loving terrorist anti-gun anti-family murderers of the unborn that embrace perversion so long as it’s subsidized by a government funded by taxes from working families who we will stop at nothing to break up with politically correct racial bigotry. Also, we’re weak on national security. Alterman goes through and explains why each of these stereotypes is strongly held by the public at-large, how the conservative movement created those misimpressions, and what mistakes liberals made to encourage those beliefs. On every issue conceivable, Alterman makes sure to walk us through the very real fact that Americans, when you talk about issues themselves, are liberal.

After I read most of the way through the book, I realized why I was I was confused. I had expected the book to discuss why we’re liberal, because that’s the title, but the focus was on why liberalism has been discredited despite wide public agreement with liberals on the issues. And in that discussion, it’s really a first-rate and meticulous piece of work. If you want to know why a certain stereotype is held about liberals, there’s no better book than this one. In addition, it’s extremely useful to read this to get a sense for how these impressions have been embedded in liberals themselves.

I think the structure of the book as well as the title contributed to my confusion. The first part of the book discusses liberalism itself, when it should have started with how the modern liberal brand is considered. In his section tracing the history of liberalism and what we believe Alterman doesn’t really define liberalism except to say that it is bears some analogies to the European welfare state, and goes through a narrative about why liberals lost power. The argument is organized around an ascendant right-wing and a culture war in the 1960s which the left basically lost, making a series of political mistakes from institutional weakness to checklist liberalism to excessive purity.

It’s impossible not to have tremendous admiration for Alterman’s work, but his understanding of what it means to be a liberal made no sense to me. Here’s a sample passage, discussing the Take Back America conference in 2005.

She was followed to the podium by Jesse Jackson, who likened progressives to "the third rail of American politics." The first two rails, Jackson explained, were the two parties. The third was a "strong independent force". As Gitlin rightly noted, Jackson’s metaphor may have been unwittingly revealing. "Third rails may carry the power, but they are also lethal." Sadly, he reports, both Gandy and Jackson drew standing ovations. Elections are not won by subtraction, and coalitions are not built on the basis of purity tests. But this is a fact of political life that all too many influential voices on the left refuse even to recognize.

Now, I have fought with traditional top-down liberals a lot. And I believe in fighting and argument, and I don’t always think the liberal groups deal in good faith. But it rubbed me the wrong way that an argument for a strong independent movement, once that operates to influence both parties, is considered a mark of ideological purity. The right-wing has been successful by taking over the Republican Party, but also by influencing the Democratic Party through politicians like Joe Lieberman and through funding networks like the DLC and the Koch brothers. They own the GOP, and about a fifth to a third of the Democratic Party depending on the issue. I don’t see how that can be considered anything but an independent and strong conservative movement, and while I don’t agree with their value system, I don’t understand why we shouldn’t recognize this as a remarkable organizing success and something to replicate.

Alterman relies on the analysis of people like Tom Edsall, who think that the Republican Party is the party of successful entrepreneurs; a cursory glance at Silicon Valley and the new energy economy shows that the economy of the future is not a conservative one. He discusses how the liberal base is just not as motivated towards activism as the conservative base, they have more door-knockers and volunteers, an argument that looks a bit outdated in the context of 2006, 2008, and the huge millenial-driven surge in activism.

Alterman argues that the netroots and the internet left, when you look at Fox News and the right-wing noise machine, just "do not compare to their right-wing counterparts". There is some truth to that in terms of overall reach of audience, but it’s a simplistic statement that ignores the larger cultural changes in American society and the utter dominance of the left in the increasingly influential Internet sphere of politics.

Alterman argues that liberals see gray and nuance, whereas conservatives see the world in black and white. He thinks that liberals see themselves as above politics, and that the ‘the Left’ is too much into ideological purity. This causes him to make political arguments that are highly questionable, such as his analysis of the 2006 election.

Liberals played a smart hand during the 2006 election, for once. Instead of focusing attention on the social and cultural issues that have traditionally proven so divisive within the Democratic Party and distasteful to so many people outside it, they swallowed their differences on these topics and reached out for a common position based on what looked to voters like a combination of populist economics and common sense. No one complained (much) when party leaders recruited candidates in certain areas who had conservative social positions, like Bob Casey Jr, the pro-life candidate for Senator in Pennsylvania, or Heath Shuler, who ran successfully for Congress in North Carolina on a pro-gun, pro-life platform. Without selling out their political principles, they agreed to disagree with others in their party about gun control, abortion, and gay marriage and focus instead of those issues that united them and a broad swath of the American public. In achieving those goals, liberals demonstrated not only impressive political pragmatism but some newfound political muscle.

Electing conservatives like Heath Shuler was not a smart strategy, as the capitulation of Congress on core progressive issues implies. The 2006 election was focused on Iraq, and if we had put progressives up for election everywhere, we would have put progressives in office. Any ham sandwich could have beaten Republicans that year. It just so happens that conservative Democrats put their candidates up for election, so that’s who got into Congress.

As for Alterman’s arguments about what is and isn’t liberal, I find them equally puzzling. If liberals can’t see black and white, then why is there such visceral liberal dislike for George Bush and Dick Cheney among Democrats? Why do we consider the war in Iraq immoral? If we are above politics, then why did a vast movement arise to beat Bush back over Social Security, John Bolton, Iraq, retroactive immunity, net neutrality, etc. Why do we fight against torture, if we see no black and white?

It seems to me that there is something of a gap in political philosophy right now, as the theoretical basis for an exceptionally partisan liberal sphere which operates in a right-wing dominated and bad faith suffused political environment is relatively unexplored. In addition, the impact of the enormous growth in the public space that is the Internet strikes me as pretty meaningful, and that has yet to be fused into what it means to modern liberalism. These are questions I’d like to see answered, though they are not simple.

There are a good number of other questions that I have about his argument, but none of this is to take away from his accomplishment in writing Why We’re Liberals. It is a forcefully argued book in which he describes in detail how liberalism came to be put into such a sorry state, and why it is in such dire need of renewal. We have a broad tent ideology, focused on argument, debate, and social justice, and it is an honor to welcome Eric Alterman here today.

Related posts:

  1. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Eric Boehlert, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
  2. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted
  3. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Benjamin Page, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality
  4. FDL Book Salon Welcomes James K. Galbraith – The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too
  5. FDL Book Salon – The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized The American Right