All hands are on deck in the progressive community working to surprise the pundits and stave off too many Republican victories on election day. And all the last minute work really does matter, as I will document in my next post about the closeness of margins in swing Congressional races even in years where one party or the other is making big gains. We all need to keep focused and keep our nose to the grindstone, because this election's fate is not yet decided. The President is out on the campaign trail working his butt off; the Democratic leadership in Congress is raising money and helping out in every way they can; the staffers for the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, and other party committees are out in the field working their hearts out in races all over the country. They are joined by activists from the netroots and every kind of progressive organization knocking on doors, making calls, coming to rallies, and doing everything in their power to turn the tide. It makes me proud that so many people are working so hard even when- in fact, especially when- the going has gotten so tough.
However, I just need to stop for a moment and quickly note, because it will become hugely more important in the weeks and months following the election, that not everyone who in the administration is on the same team. All the passion so many people are showing makes it all the more galling to have certain as yet to be found out people in the Treasury Department, people who owe their jobs to all of you who worked so hard to get President Obama elected in 2008, stabbing us all in the back in the very last days of this campaign. Check out Zach Carter's superb post this morning on the snakes in the Treasury Department who are working to undermine the President, his new appointee Elizabeth Warren, and all of us in the progressive world who are so excited about the potential of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau right before the election. Their petty leaks and nasty attacks are the worst kind of Washington BS. They made a rotten attack on Raj Date , who is a brilliant, progressive, and committed man who was a leader in making the financial reform bill stronger. As to the office paint job leak, it is just laughable: I was over at Elizabeth's very plain office in the standard government building where she is spending 95% of her time, and she hasn't even taken the time to put a picture on the wall. She is a frugal, modest Oklahoman who is so driven by the work that she probably wouldn't even notice if someone repainted her office. And the media hound charge is just funny: senior White House officials told me weeks ago that they wanted Elizabeth to be as visible as possible in the final days before the election because she is a strong voice for the middle class. Literally all the media bookings for her have come at the request of the White House communications shop.
I have always told people that working in the Clinton White House, I met some of the best people I have ever known and some of the worst. There are people who are in government for all the right reasons, because they want to make the country a better place and really help improve the lives of regular people. Elizabeth Warren is one of the very best of that group. And there are people who are in government because they are looking to brownnose the industries they are supposed to be regulating so they can get a really high paying lobbyist job after a few years in government. It is very clear that some of the people in Treasury, certainly the people doing these absurd attacks, are in the latter category. They don't care about screwing over the President and the Democratic Party in the days before the election, and they certainly don't care about helping consumers. What they care about is sucking up to the Wall Street bankers who they hope will give them a sweet job sometime soon.
I have a message for the leakers at Treasury, though: you are playing with fire. The two people closest to the President at the White House, Pete Rouse and Valerie Jarrett, are huge fans of Warren, and I know these leaks have caught their attention. I would love to see a serious investigation into these leaks once the election is over, and it just might happen. And whatever happens on the inside, the entire progressive community- bloggers, members of Congress, labor and consumer organizations- have Elizabeth Warren's back. Right now, unlike you leakers, we are focused on winning elections, but after the election, we will be gunning for you.
Stephen Colbert's much-publicized March to Keep Fear Alive tomorrow-and his whole schtick really-may be making a far greater political impact than you consciously realize. I'm no neuroscientist, but I might even argue that the faux right-wing pundit is physically altering the very structure of your brain.
Such an outlandish allegation requires a little set-up. Ready for an adventure into the political brain?
Let's start with rats.
In a brilliant Radiolab episode called Memory and Forgetting (I highly recommend listening to the first 21 minutes here), hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss a memory experiment with rats. They play an audio tone for a rat, just before giving it a slight electrical shock. Predictably, the next time the tone is played, the rat reacts. Here's Jad:
The moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock, inside its head a bunch of neurons start to build a connection... Memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, since inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells, it's gonna know that after this [tone sound plays] comes this [shock sound effect plays]. Instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze, bracing itself for what is about to happen.
Ok, duh, but here's a little more about how it happens physically inside the brain. Memory is "a physical thing," explains regular Radiolab contributor Jonah Leher (author of the book How We Decide), "It's not simply an idea. It's a physical trace left in your brain. [A trace made largely of] proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of memory."
Neuroscientists figured this out through experiments with the drug anisomycin, which inhibits the formation of new proteins. They found that without new proteins there can be no new memory. So when they repeated the experiment but this time gave the rats anisomycin as they played the tone (right before the shock), these rats did not react to the tone afterward. They could not learn a correlation between tone and shock, because they could not form proteins to make this experience into a memory.
It is the week before Christmas- oh, wait, sorry, I'm getting punchy, wrong season. It is the week before election night, and the creatures are definitely stirring. And I'm not just talking about Republicans, either.
The President is doing what a President should do right before an election, and reaching to those of us in his base. The base is stirring in return, simultaneously challenging him and also getting more pumped up about this election. And the DC establishment version of Democratic moderates are stirring around too, not wanting to be left out of the conversation.
Let me address the last point first. Third Way has a new memo out arguing that us lefties need moderate Democrats to succeed, and I actually agree in part. The point they make about there not being enough progressives in the House, let alone in the Senate with their dysfunctional and thoroughly outdated filibuster rules, to get bills passed is true enough and probably will be for a while. And as I have been arguing for many years with my fellow progressives for many years, even though the demographics get steadily better for us progressives year after year, and even though voters actually agree with us progressives on most important issues, we still do need independent and swing voters to win elections.
There are multiple places where their argument breaks down, though. For one thing, their argument re data is always based on self-identified liberals vs self-identified moderates, but the liberal brand has become so poisoned that very few people use it to describe themselves. Most people associate the term "liberal" with east and west coast social issue liberals, and some of the most loyal Democratic and progressive issue voters- including a majority of African-Americans, Hispanics, unmarried working class women, union members, or young people- don't use the term about themselves. Secondly, the proposition that more ideological cohesion would make it easier to get things done in Congress is pretty hard to argue with, even though folks like the Third Way keep trying, and I think party leaders would be far better served to keep that in mind when recruiting and prioritizing which kinds of candidates to help: if it's a close call in terms of winning the election, the DCCC should help Mary Jo Kilroy before they help Bobby Bright, helping the loyalist who will vote with the Democratic caucus on almost all of the tough votes makes a lot of sense.
The biggest problem with the Third Way argument, though, connects to the fascinating back and forth between Obama and progressive interviewers in recent weeks: the palpable frustration expressed by, say, Jon Stewart in his interview is far less about having to make compromises to get things done, and far more with the insider-y ways deals were cut and decisions were made re what to compromise on. This is what Third Way and other pundits who argue for moderation never seem to understand: their version of centrism and the rest of the country's are very different. As I wrote a while back:
In Washington, being a moderate means being for raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for Social Security. In the rest of America, fighting to preserve Social Security is a huge plus for voters. In Washington, being a moderate means being for "free trade" deals. In the rest of America, working class swing voters hate the trade deals that they know are shipping their jobs overseas. In Washington, being a moderate means being for extending all of the Bush tax cuts even those for millionaires. In the rest of America, it is those working class swing voters who don't like those kinds of tax cuts.
Most of all, being a moderate in Washington means getting along nicely with all those corporate lobbyists who keep coming to see you (and dropping off checks). In the rest of America, swing voters and base voters are completely united that Washington is too controlled by wealthy and powerful special interests, and that their power needs to be rolled back. The polling numbers on strict new lobby reforms, on rolling back the Citizens United decision, on public financing so that candidates aren't dependent on special interests for campaign cash are incredibly strong. Voters are disgusted by the kind of business as usual described in this article from Roll Call. If Democratic candidates spent their time attacking that kind of special interest funding and the attack ads being generated by corporate cash, they would have swing as well as Democratic base vote standing up and cheering.
Now I'm not going to pretend that part of progressive frustration hasn't been about Obama compromising on really important issues to us: clearly most of us have argued passionately in favor of things like a public option and breaking up the big banks, and against the choice language on the health care bill and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But a great deal of the frustration has been about the sense, fair or not, that the administration is accepting the standard way of doing business in Washington: cutting deals with corporate lobbyists early rather than boldly challenging them. My sense is that the essential argument between Obama and Stewart was that Obama was arguing that he is doing the best he can given the system he is dealing with, and Stewart is arguing that he should push harder to change the system itself.
The Obama-Stewart interview, the Rolling Stone interview, the session with bloggers yesterday are actually thrilling to me in that they represent a healthy, honest give and take between a Democratic President in the modern era and progressive media. While I wish Obama would answer some things differently, and wish certain questions or follow-ups would have been asked that weren't, both sides are doing their jobs in the thrust and parry. Obama is doing the interviews in the first place, encouraging people to ask him tough questions and not shying away when they do, defending himself and making his case that he cares about the same things the base cares about. The questioners are asking pointed questions about why is he isn't doing better, or why his policy decisions haven't been different. That honest give and take is exactly what needs to be happening, except there needs to be more of it. The President needs to directly engage his base, be willing to take more and tougher questions and criticism from those of us in progressive politics. And the base should push the President, and the entire administration, aggressively and specifically on the crucial issues of the day. I appreciated the President mentioning Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", where King made his brilliant and timeless "why we can't wait" argument. Progressives should always push for more, we should always organize and agitate and complain. That is our job. Center-left Presidents need a left flank, and they should do what President Obama has been doing lately: engage that left flank directly and openly. That is the only way progress is made. So, Mr. President, I hope you will keep doing these interviews, and I hope the questions keep being tough and get even tougher. I hope you and your inner circle build and strengthen your relationships with those of us who keep pushing from your left, because you need us politically and you need us to actually make progress. The abolitionists in the 1860s kept challenging Lincoln, the populists and progressives around the turn of the 20th century kept challenging Teddy Roosevelt, the labor movement kept making FDR "do it", and the civil rights movement kept challenging Jack and Bobby Kennedy and LBJ. And in each era, both the Presidents and the progressive movements of the time worked constructively together to make big changes. If Obama wants to be a successful President, he needs to keep engaging with us, and progressives need to keep engaging with him.
In a year where Democrats are running from their records, I'm excited to report that 95 Bold Democrats together with the PCCC went on offense today announcing they'll fight to protect Net Neutrality.
As PCCC senior online campaigns director Jason Rosenbaum said this morning, this announcement is " the first time ever that congressional candidates have joined together to make net neutrality an election issue."
Here's John Edwards over 3 years ago on the freedom to marry for same-sex couples:
It is [a hard issue] ... because I'm 53 years old. I grew up in a small town in the rural south. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church and so I have a belief system that arises from that. It's part of who I am. I can't make it disappear. ... I personally feel great conflict about that. I don't know the answer. I wish I did. I think from my perspective it's very easy for me to say, gay civil unions, yes, partnership benefits, yes, but it is something that I struggle with. Do I believe they should have the right to marry? I'm just not there yet."
I noticed a strikingly similar response from President Obama yesterday. Here's Joe Sudbay asking the President about his position on the same issue:
Q So I have another gay question. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: It's okay, man. (Laughter.)
Q And this one is on the issue of marriage. Since you've become President, a lot has changed. More states have passed marriage equality laws. This summer a federal judge declared DOMA unconstitutional in two different cases. A judge in San Francisco declared Prop 8 was unconstitutional. And I know during the campaign you often said you thought marriage was the union between a man and a woman, and there -- like I said, when you look at public opinion polling, it's heading in the right direction. We've actually got Republicans like Ted Olson and even Ken Mehlman on our side now. So I just really want to know what is your position on same-sex marriage?
THE PRESIDENT: Joe, I do not intend to make big news sitting here with the five of you, as wonderful as you guys are. (Laughter.) But I'll say this --
Q I just want to say, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this question.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course.
Q People in our community are really desperate to know.
THE PRESIDENT: I think it's a fair question to ask. I think that -- I am a strong supporter of civil unions. As you say, I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage.
But I also think you're right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships. I have staff members who are in committed, monogamous relationships, who are raising children, who are wonderful parents.
And I care about them deeply. And so while I'm not prepared to reverse myself here, sitting in the Roosevelt Room at 3:30 in the afternoon, I think it's fair to say that it's something that I think a lot about. That's probably the best you'll do out of me today. (Laughter.)
Q It is an important issue, and I think that --
THE PRESIDENT: I think it's an entirely fair question to ask.
Q And part of it is that you can't be equal in this country if the very core of who you are as a person and the love -- the person you love is not -- if that relationship isn't the same as everybody else's, then we're not equal. And I think that a lot of -- particularly in the wake of the California election on Prop 8, a lot of gay people realized we're not equal. And I think that that's -- that's been part of the change in the --
THE PRESIDENT: Prop 8, which I opposed.
Q Right. I remember you did. You sent the letter and that was great. I think that the level of intensity in the LGBT community changed after we lost rights in that election. And I think that's a lot of where the community is right now.
THE PRESIDENT: The one thing I will say today is I think it's pretty clear where the trendlines are going.
Q The arc of history.
THE PRESIDENT: The arc of history.
At the time when Edwards made his statement, I was disappointed and angry that a candidate for President basically admitting he may be on the wrong side of good judgment and history, blaming his religion for his feelings, and other poor reasoning.
I got some of that with the President yesterday, who's clearly setting himself up to come out in support (a position, ahem, he was already in during his 1996 run for State Senate). On the one hand, he clearly doesn't want to make this an issue just before the midterms, which I can appreciate. And I also appreciate the subtle hints he's dropping. I think his heart is in the right place (and let me also say that I appreciate the White House taking the time to meet with five independent, often strongly critical, smart bloggers, and I hope they do it again).
On the other hand, I can tell him that he will find it harder and harder to ask for support from the LGBT and allied community in 2012 if he continues to be on the wrong side of this issue- whether or not Prop 8 or DOMA rulings go our way. I've seen candidate after candidate this cycle- Republican and Democrat- use the person who calls himself our "fierce advocate" as a shield on this issue by saying "my position on [gay] marriage is the same as President Obama's!", something that makes me wince every time I hear it.
So I think that for me and many of my friends and colleagues, time- and patience- is running out, Mr. President.
Note- Angie Buhl is a fantastic candidate and strong LGBT ally I've come to know.
PFAW Action Fund is sponsoring OpenLeft through the election with a series on young progressive candidates around the country.
For the progressive movement to succeed we need to put young progressives in the leadership pipeline, and People For the American Way is doing just that by promoting dedicated activists who are running for public office for the first time. Young advocates for social and economic justice, women’s rights, LGBT equality, and environmental protection are doing tremendous jobs as community organizers, non-profit leaders, bloggers, and campaign workers. For the activists running for elected positions, People For the American Way Action Fund hopes to provide them with the support and resources to manage a successful campaign and advance progressive public policy.
In Maryland and South Dakota, two young progressive champions are waging their first campaigns for elected office, and will bring their years of experience in the progressive movement to their state capitals.
Meet Ariana Kelly of Maryland and Angie Buhl of South Dakota, two dynamic activists who are fighting for change in their communities.
In the 2003 meta-analysis of 88 empirical studies Conservatism as Socially Motivated Cognition, the authors argued that--contrary to paranoid interpretations placed on their work--conservatism was not a form of mental aberration, but rather part of the normal range of human cognitive variation. However, the surprisingly rapid evolution of intense conservative hostility to the building of the Park 51 cultural center--even resulting in acts of violence--clearly provides a case study in which mass pathological behavior DID emerge, in a very short period of time. In turn that episode provides a model that could be scaled up to describe a larger trajectory toward a fascist end-state, as I've discussed in a couple of recent diaries. WHat's more, the meta-analysis DOES help us to understand what was happening. It presented evidence that the motivations involved were multi-factoral, and included SITUATIONAL effects as well as stable dispositional factors. It's the combination of such factors that's responsible for mass phenomena exhibiting pathology well beyond what's seen simply by looking at isolated dispositional factors. And the end result of this process over a long enoug time, or enough repetitions can very well pave the way to fascism.
In a story last week, the New York Times, which framed the project in a largely positive, noncontroversial light last December, argued that it was cursed from the start by "public relations missteps." But this isn't accurate. To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.
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The Media Matters timeline, which freely credits and quotes from Elliot's earlier piece, provides extensively detailed support for this account. It has a brief introduction, followed by chronological entries grouped by month since last December (except for the period January 2010-April 2010, when the story "went into hiding). While extremely useful in itself to see how the anti-Muslim bigotry was stoked, the timeline also offers a framework for beginning to understand how this campaign reflects the hegemonic growth of movement conservatism in a time of flux, and how we can better understand it, while also shedding light on other related developments. This also serves to provide an opportunity to begin to explain how an integrated cognitive theory of conservatism might work, including an elucidation of how dispositional and situational factors both play roles and can interact.
This diary is written in some haste--as are most blog diaries--and makes no pretense to the sort of rigor one should expect from a scholarly article, but I am drawing significantly from one such very comprehensive article below, the meta-analysis "Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition", and this diary is specifically intended to help spur further discussion, debate and analysis, rather than to stand as any sort of definitive summary. Furthermore, I'm only dealing with some aspects of a small subset of the discussion in that ambitious overview. But it's enough, I warrant, to suggest the power a more robust effort might hold.
I will proceed as follows. In section one, I will present a broad sketch of the time-line itself. In section two, I will reflect on it briefly in a general way. In section three, I will introduce some relevant aspects of the analysis from "Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition." These will provide a framework for looking at the timeline itself, but also for the larger framerwork of developments it is embedded within. I will provide a cursory examination of these in section four.
My friend Erica Payne at the Agenda Project has developed this last week of the election project well worth checking out. Here's the website, and here's the video:
The idea is simple: pivoting off the Jon Stewart Sanity rally this weekend, progressives should close the election in part by making the point that the Republicans truly have gone off the deep edge. Their candidates and spokespeople have gone beyond being merely conservative, beyond even just garden variety extremist, but deep, deep, deep into wackadoodle land. As another friend, Drew Westen, likes to put it: "We want candidates who will hear the voices of the American people, but we don't want people who just hear voices."
Check out the video and website. They are funny and drive home a really important message: we don't want crazy people running our government.
