In a recent interview on Moyer’s and Company, political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. discussed his feature article in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine,“Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals.” Reed states that, “if the left is tied to a Democratic strategy that, at least since the Clinton Administration, tries to win elections by absorbing much of the right’s social vision and agenda, before long the notion of a political left will have no meaning. For all intents and purposes, that is what has occurred.” If you have 20 minutes, I would highly recommend watching the whole interview.
I share this because it sums up nicely how I feel about the current state of the Massachusetts Democratic gubernatorial race. I would venture to guess that many supporters of the more mainstream candidates (Grossman and Coakley) care more about the eventual Democratic nominee’s electability than his or her actual proposed policies.
Don Berwick has by far the most innovative and detailed policy proposals of any of the five Democratic candidates running for Governor. In a state that in 2012 propelled Elizabeth Warren into the US Senate, I think that Don is also an extremely electable candidate. He is the most progressive candidate in the race and has the executive leadership experience to get things done. If you agree or disagree, please feel free to post below.
While that appeals to me, it probably frightens may low-information (i.e. Republican) voters.
low-information is not the same as Republican
…but it does seem in recent years that the circles on that particular Venn diagram are getting closer to directly overlapping.
Seriously, this wasn’t based on high levels of information.
It isn’t that so many Republicans are low-information voters, it’s that so many low-information voters are Republican.
I think you are confusing epistemic closure on the Right with being low information, i.e. choosing not to pay much attention to politics.
I understand “epistemic closure on the Right” to mean, in a political context, to mean something like the definition offered in Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Please help me out by explaining how a belief system that excludes empirical evidence (I guess climate change denial being the canonical example) differs from choosing to be a “low information” voter?
One can pay LOTS of attention to politics and still have information content asymptotically approaching zero (I offer DFW as an example).
“Low information voter” is a technical term. It has its own Wikipedia page, too. It doesn’t mean someone who excludes evidence. We all exclude evidence by the way: confirmation bias is a big thing.
An epistemically closed conservative watches Fox News all the time; a low information voter watches no news at all.
On some things, your typical conservative may know a lot more than you do. I am guessing you don’t know the names of everyone involved at Benghazi, exactly who was involved with Fast and Furious, or whose applications for tax exempt status got held up by the IRS.
I have friends in Boston who called me the day before the mayoral election because they didn’t have a clue what was going on. One didn’t even know Menino was retiring and was panicked because he planned to vote for Menino as usual. Turns out he hadn’t even bothered to register at his new address. This is the same guy who had somehow never heard of Scott Brown as of October 2012. That’s a low-information voter.
While understanding the distinction, I understood Tom’s point to be that knowing lots of Fox News info is not much different from being a low-information voter when everything you “know” is bullshit.
…and not in a good way. I can’t find a link now, but I recall reading a poll awhile back indicating that those who relied on Fox actually knew less in terms of accurate information than those who didn’t pay much attention to news at all.
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You originally said those Fox News watchers know more info than low-info voters, but it was biased info. I said: when all the info you know is false, it comes out about the same. Christopher said: Actually they know less TRUE info than someone who watches no news.
The poll tested on precisely the items on which conservatives have closed out liberal evidence. That’s different, say, from knowing who the Attorney General is.
🙂
Regarding the current gubernatorial race as far as I can tell they are all progressive. Nobody seems to be running for the conservadem niche a la Stephen Lynch or Jim Miceli. In general I get turned off pretty quickly by the my-candidate-is-more-progressive-than-your-candidate sniping.
I do think, however, that Senators Jamie Eldridge and Sonia Chang-Diaz’s endorsements of Don do help to establish him as a strong, progressive candidate and it is up to each voter to decide who he or she would like to support.
All the candidates may call themselves “progressive”. Still, Ms. Coakley surely stakes out both campaign stances and policy decisions as AG (such as on privacy, expansion of war powers, militarization of police, etc.) significantly to the right of the other four (with the possible exception of Mr. Avellone). Surely Mr. Grossman is the next most right-ward. I have a hard time getting a read on where Ms. Kayem fits on that spectrum. It appears to me that characterizing Mr. Berwick as the left-most candidate is accurate.
I’m not sure it’s “sniping” to talk about the left-to-right spread of the five candidates. Surely Mr. Reed’s hypothesis is at least worthy of consideration. To the extent that it is true, such “sniping” strikes me as essential to the long-term perpetuation of a genuinely progressive voice.
At the time of Lincoln, the Republican Party was dramatically more “leftist” (by today’s standards) than today’s GOP. I think some could make a case that it was even left of today’s Democratic Party, at least at the national level. It seems to me that such dramatic shifts are a consequence of discarding Mr. Reed’s hypothesis without at least some discussion.
It may turn you off, but I think the attempted characterization is valuable.
I liked Harold Myerson’s reply to Reed on the Prospect (one of the best progressive policy journals in the country btw) that makes pretty good hay of this premise. To me guys like Reed remind, and increasingly Thomas Frank, write very pessimistically and actually undercut the movement. Obama or Clinton won’t be moved by a Harper’s article calling a pox on both houses and throwing its hands up. Voting against ACA would’ve set the progressive movement back, voting for Nader did set the movement back.
They will listen when you get mobilized and when you start voting your conscience in numbers. Frank and Reed sometimes defeat that by making it seem that the system is rigged and we are all truly powerless. The Prospect has done a great job showing how Texas liberals, not blue dogs, but honest to goodness liberals are leading the takeover of that state. They have covered Moral Monday which has been a tremendous success in North Carolina getting the faith community mobilized behind progressive populist economic justice. The movement in LA, which Meyerson and Kuttner have discussed on the Prospect, getting labor and non-unionized workers to have class solidarity and focus on the collective good for all working families. De Blasio has shown no signs he is going to bend an inch since he was given a massive mandate-against a fellow Democrat I might add.
Instead of griping about the general election choices we may have, let’s acknowledge that while the nation may be center right, there is no excuse for that at the state level. It’s why I am backing Berwick full throttle after flirting with Grossman. Grossman is still my stop-Coakley candidate if it comes to that, and the pragmatic part of me feels he might be more effective at moving legislation, but I would rather vote my heart, and conscience, and vote for someone who had the ideas and the passion to achieve them. And if he can get seasoned pros like Eldirge, like Chang-Diaz, pros who have passed legislation past our regressively “Democratic” legislature, than he might be able to move the ball. They can be his floor leaders, and more importantly, we can be the troops that get it done.
No reason to sit down and say it’s too hard to win so why bother trying, and that is exactly what articles like this do.
…especially as regards “why bother trying” — we all need to get more energized and try hard, it seems to me. The service people like Reed provide is often to point out specific ways in which the right is making it structurally harder to achieve progressive goals — erecting barriers against our agency. That is, the “rigging” of the system is nuanced, and we need to understand the nuances more clearly to identify which parts are more rigged than others and where our efforts will be most important or most effective. I will read the Myerson piece. Right now I like both Berwick and Grossman.
Thomas Frank has also been quite demoralizing of late, I don’t mean to lump them together but they are both Harper’s writers and strong critics of the Democratic Party from the left. Frank in particular, used to have very good analysis of how to re-frame the arguments to suit our current time and beat back the right. Unfortunately his solution, ramp up the economic populism and downplay divisive social issues, was a road not taken in a fork we can no longer return to.
And I think he has grown embittered by this. Reed has the same tone. I agree with a poster downthread that he paints with too broad a brush and is really making a bromide against the President and his party while critically misreading European leftists and clearly not reading the Nation anytime recently (non stop criticism, particularly from Pearlstein).
The right is making it structurally harder to achieve progressive goals, but we still live in a democracy and there will be a growing and quite sizable progressive majority in the future. Members of my generation, much like my grandparents, have faced some of the worst consequences of our free market and will want a stronger government to have our back. The right’s intolerance can only keep us default Democrats for another 10 or 15 years, it will require a new commitment to a fair economy to cement our loyalty.
I am not excited about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton from a policy perspective, but politically, a third consecutive win, particularly if it brings in a Democratic House and solid Senate (and 2016 is way better than 14′ for that map), and some state legislatures for 2020, and we can start getting to business. Starting locally, cementing the end of the corporate Mayor era (and Garcetii, De Blasio, and Walsh are encouragements-time to dump Gray and Emmanuel), and ushering in progressive statehouses (Shumlin and Malloy are doing great work, the OR legislature, and hopefully the Bay State), is also crucial.
We were sleeping at the wheel while they built ALEC into an impregnable fortress in some states. This article’s main flaw is focusing on the failure of progressive politics at the presidential level, but it neglects to mention that FDR himself ran as a fiscal conservative with fiscally conservative instincts and it required progressive Governors, statehouses, and some third party challengers to push him to the left. The same can be true today. Start local where big money is far less powerful, work our way up, the grassroots are where the change occurs anyway. I think we have lost our focus on that with the 24 hour news cycle and obsession with presidential campaigns, and Reed fails to see the forest for the trees by focusing on Obama instead of celebrating Warren, Walsh, De Blasio, Malloy, Shumlin, a quietly reviving labor movement, a revived Christian left, and grassroots activism across the country.
I would have placed Grossman closer to the left, probably only second to Berwick. Coakley can also burnish her progressive credentials on things like DOMA and fighting to keep people in their homes.
but I left my protractor at home.
I’m not sure I get the reference. Are you talking about measuring degrees of progressivism like we measure degrees of angles?
Exactly. I’m saying trying to arrange the candidates on a carefully calibrated left-right scale (“to the left of Feinstein, to the right of Merkley”) is kind of obscure and perhaps not very useful.
However doing so does please the inner obsessive-compulsive we all carry about with us.
…where based on how you answer the questions they plot you on a grid as opposed to a line. The x axis is economic and the y axis is social issues, or something like that.
Well, I don’t know about protractors or OCD, but I do know that I don’t need a protractor to figure out that Mr. Berwick is WAY left of Ms. Coakley.
Those are the only two data points I care about.
strange. Reed is a lefty. He was a founding member of the erstwhile U.S. Labor Party (1996-2007). He’s also a scholar and political scientist.
But the article reads like something written by a Very Serious Person, a sort of left-wing David Brodeur. Reed generalizes about specific events, personifies and attributes choices to the Left. It’s a straw man tactic. Slavoj Zizek, one of the leading leftist intellectuals in Europe, is at best extremely very complex, versed in philosophy, Marxism, and post-structuralism and specializing in Lacan, he requires careful reading. At best, Reed oversimplifies Slavoj Zizek, at worst, misrepresents him. Reed claims that Katrina Vanden Heuvel and The Nation was fooled by Barack Obama the candidate. Evidence? None.
Perhaps even worse, his bromides for the Left are at least 10 years too late. The Left doesn’t need to wake up–if it ever was asleep–it’s awakening began 10 years ago with the blogosphere re-focusing and relegitimizing of the Left. Political discourse is now moving in our direction. We may not yet qualify as a movement, but we’re getting there.
Even if Hillary is nominated she will be running on a platform drafted and voted on by delegates who volunteer and donate because of people like Elizabeth Warren. This is because the left controls the apparatus of the modern Democratic Party. She will have to to run on our platform and it will be a left wing platform.
…the nominee generally gets a lot of influence on the platform, and of course candidates ignore platforms all the time.
That’s all right then.
from an organizational point of view. Some of our organizations will have to be play harder ball. The MTA and NEA leadership, for example, should make its endorsements contingent upon support of our platforms and a promise of that the next Secretary of Education will be someone like Linda Darling-Hammond.