The First Step in Dealing with the Tea-Party Crowd

Former Bush spechwriter Michael Gerson emphasizes that the right-wing extremism of Sharon Angle, Rand Paul, and Glenn Beck "are not merely excesses; they are arguments."

Of course, what Gerson wants is the Republican leadership to develop counter-arguments before the whole GOP is defined by the worst aspects of the Tea Party movement.

It's probably too late for the GOP. The party of Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey was never that far from the Tea Party movement to start with.

And it isn't like Glenn Beck came from nowhere either.

Still, the Democrats can learn something from Gerson here. Instead of mocking the Tea Party people as extremists, racists, hypocrites, and an on-going freak show, the Democrats should focus on developing counter-arguments to Tea Party claims.

By taking the Tea Party people seriously, we can hit them at their weakest point.

Limbaugh in Hawaiian Hospital

Talking Points Memo is carrying an item about Rush Limbaugh being taken to a Honolulu hospital in "serious condition" with "chest pains."

I hope he's okay.

And I mean it. When Limbaugh was in rehab for his drug addiction, I posted on Slate's Fray that people on the left should respect Limbaugh as a formidable adversary and have the same kind of sympathy for him in adversity that we have for our own friends and allies. That doesn't mean that we should be "soft" on Limbaugh. We should be hitting Limbaugh hard for his conservative positions, showing disgust for his racism, homophobia, and warmongering, and ridiculing him for his pseudo-macho buffoonery.

But people on the left should also extend Limbaugh the same basic human compassion we extend to other people.

Maybe Limbaugh wouldn't have that kind of compassion for someone like me.

But that doesn't make it any less appropriate to have compassion for him.

The Joe Lieberman Conundrum

There are times when I think the progressive media is just as committed as the mainstream media to avoiding any kind of policy debate concerning health reform.

Talking Points Memo and HuffPost have little discussion of either Democratic proposals or health policy more generally. Progressive media sources actually do very little in the way of promoting any Democratic ideas on health reform. Likewise, they have little information on how the current financing of the health system works, why it costs so much, and why our results on life-span, infant mortality, and other measures of health are so poor compared to other countries. A number of stories about the inhumanity of health insurance companies to their policy-holders have been published by HuffPost. But I'm aware of no reporting on how the corporate strategies of the health insurance companies reinforce their drive to reject legitimate claims from sick individuals.

Instead of discussing health policy, the progressive media focuses on three themes--dissecting the political process, publicizing to right-wing "outrages," and vilifying Democratic "traitors." For most of this week, the focus has been on the Joe Lieberman's "treason." Just as McCain stole the thunder from Obama's convention speech by announcing his nomination of Sarah Palin, Lieberman undercut the progressive euphoria over Harry Reid's support for a public option by declaring the next day that he would filibuster any bill including a public option. Since then, the progressive media has been obsessing about Lieberman's desertion of the Democrats. Why, the progressive media asks, would Lieberman oppose a public option now when he embraced the public option during his 2004 presidential campaign? Why is Lieberman so eager to filibuster now when he's always been suspicious of filibustering in the past? In a way, this is all a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lieberman's "treason" toward the Democratic Party has been a major theme in the progressive media ever since the first emergence of the left blogosphere. But this is Lieberman's most important treason to date. Lieberman's sabotaging the legislative agenda of a Democratic president who's gone out of his way to to be nice to him. Why would he do that?

Glenn Greenwald, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Conason argue that Lieberman opposes health reform for corrupt reasons, either because his wife works for health lobbyists or because the health insurance companies have contributed huge money to his re-election campaigns. Here's Joe Conason:

The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

Also, here's Glenn Greenwald on the Rachel Maddow show discussing Lieberman's ties to the health industry.

But I don't think that Joe Lieberman's ties to the health industry are the issue. The main problem with Lieberman is his bitterness over the re-emergence of an energized Democratic left during the Bush years. I imagine that Lieberman initially thought he had a good shot at the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Lieberman had been the vice-presidential nominee in 2000, he was well-known as a result of his gazillion television appearances, and he had paid his dues. Maybe, Lieberman thought, his time had arrived and he would be able to mount a moderate to conservative challenge to George W.

But it wasn't close. The Iraq War which Lieberman supported was already a failure in early 2004 and the left blogosphere had become the focal point of opposition to the war within the Democratic Party and liberal/left constituencies. Lieberman may have been a long-time Senator from the nearby state of Connecticut, but he didn't even get 9% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary and he had become the butt of constant ridicule from people on the left (including me). Lieberman began turning away from the Democratic Party in his heart when Ned Lamont launched a successful primary challenge in 2006. Barack Obama and the rest of the establishment Democrats might have campaigned for Lieberman but that didn't make any difference. For Lieberman, the Democrats were now the party of Daily Kos, Ned Lamont, and Amy Goodman rather than the party of Al Frum, the DLC, and neo-liberalism. As he showed during the 2008 presidential campaign, Lieberman was quite willing to turn against the Democratic Party establishment that had sought to save him. But it was only because the establishment was heading up a popular political party that he now hated.

The progressive media needs to understand how satisfying the idea of filibustering the public option probably is to Joe Lieberman. Progressives humiliated Joe Lieberman in 2004 and humiliated him again in 2008. Joining with the Republicans to filibuster the progressive highlight of the health reform package is probably the most bitterly satisfying thing that Joe Lieberman has done in the last ten years. Because of the rise of the progressive movement, Joe Lieberman went from respected insider to punching bag overnight.

And now the punching bag is punching back--where it really hurts by the way.

But that's the way it goes. If Lieberman sinks the current legislation, we'll just have to find another way. Bitter guys like Lieberman almost always lose in the end.

A Reflection on the Thinness of Secularism

What's someone to do who's been emotionally terrorized by evangelical Christianity? That's one of the questions posed by Max Blumenthal in a Nation article on Matthew Murray, a young man who was raised according to the strictest tenets of "movement Christianity," profoundly rejected the faith of his parents, and ended up killing four people at a Youth with a Mission Center in Colorado.

Certainly, the child-raising techniques of Matthew Murray's pentecostal parents were grotesque enough. Here's a lengthy quote from Murray:

...my mother was into all the charismatic "fanatical evangelical" insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn't have ANY christian or non-christian music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs because she somehow thought it would make it easier to control me (I've never been diagnosed with any mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.

Murray was home-schooled from the third grade forward with his parents "educating" him according to the principles of Christian-right, self-help guru Bill Gothard. From Blumenthal's article, the main emphasis of Gothard's approach was the complete isolation of children from the larger society, intense paranoia concerning "outsiders," and a primary emphasis on submission to authority. First graders in Gothard's program sang this song about obedience.

Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name,
I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three!

Scary stuff! I would say it was cult-like, but I wonder if most "cults" are this systematic in their indoctrination. Perhaps it would be better to say that a lot of cults are "Gothard-like." I'm not sure. It would be interesting to see what the Gothard approach to Christian home-schooling said about Jesus and the doctrines of the New Testament. One of the things that characterized the ministry of Jesus was reaching beyond the limits of Judaism as the religion of proper and respectable Jewish people and connecting to Roman centurions, Phoenician women, prostitutes, tax-collectors, beggars, and other outsiders and disreputable people. But this seems like the last thing Murray's parents had in mind. From Blumenthal's account, Matthew Murray's parents and their role models were much more focused on Satan than Jesus.

The situation for Murray got worse after he went to a "discipleship training school" of Youth With A Mission (YWAM):

But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM's training center in nearby Arvada in 2002, he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques." Murray became paranoid, speaking aloud to voices only he could hear, according to a former roommate. He complained that six of his male peers had made a gay sex video and that others routinely abused drugs. Hypocrisy seemed to be all around him, or at least dark mirages of it.

After being booted out of the YWAM center, Murray began his path toward mass murder by first becoming a follower of Satanist Aleister Crowley and then engaging in:

"every sort of sexual pervrsion [sic]...that's legal," from anonymous gay sex to bestiality. He boasted of his proclivity for binge drinking, his love for death metal bands, and his penchant for spewing "blasphemy." He envisioned his new experiences as positively transcendent. "In a way it's like I'm just about completely rebelling against christianity [sic] in any way that I can," the enragé mused, "but this is a little different of a rebellion."

Blumenthal expresses surprise that Murray did not move from "hardcore Christian culture" to "secular humanism, a natural position for jaded skeptics like him." But this is where I can't follow Blumenthal. Murray was far from being a "jaded skeptic." He was an enthusiast who was highly committed to doing the opposite of what his parents wanted. Matthew Murray was just as enthusiastic a follower of Aleister Crowley as his parents had wanted him to be of the pre-fallen Ted Haggard (his mother's favorite minister). Likewise, he seems to have thrown himself just as energetically into "anonymous gay sex," "bestiality," "binge drinking," "death metal," and "blashphemy" as his parents wanted him to throw himself into mission work.

I also wonder about Blumenthal's reference to "secular humanism." I'm an atheist and a long-standing participant in the world of progressive internet writing. But Blumenthal's association of "secular humanism" and "jaded scepticism" reinforced some of my current dissatisfaction with the progressive media. Why is it the case that Blumenthal views secular humanism in terms of being jaded? My best guess is that political progressivism and secular humanism have been mostly about opposition--opposition to the Bush administration, neo-con warmongering, the religious right, and the current conservative freak show. Opposing these things is important and necessary and I've been an energetic participant. But it's also like we've gotten so "jaded" in our political opposition that we haven't developed a sense for the kind of things we're seeking for American society. Not really knowing what we want, we also don't have much of a language for articulating our ideas politically. Likewise, progressive media institutions are much more effective at "opposing" than they are at "advocating." It's not just the power of the right and the cowardice of the blue dogs that keeps us from moving forward, it's the "thin" character of our opposition mentality.

It's not like progressives are "jaded" personally. I'm a college professor who spends a lot of my time and am committed to helping students and colleagues. Lots of progressives are in helping professions like medicine, teaching, social work, and psychotherapy. But political progressivism has not done enough to articulate themes like friendship, love, mutuality, shared responsibility, and community. We don't have much of a political language for reaching out to people like who have grown up in the Christian right, participate in "death metal," are heavily into guns, and the like. Not paying attention to these dimensions of American culture, we have no way to reach out to people who are living in these ways and might be dissatisfied like Matthew Murray. We have too much of a tendency to be limited to our own liberal communities. Taking Max Blumenthal as an example, we're coming off as oppositional and "jaded" even to ourselves.

We also fail to recognize the power of cultural motifs we don't share--like the gun culture. In the case of Matthew Murray, he started elaborating on a suicide fantasy in which he kills as many Christians as he can before he dies. Then he stockpiled an arsenal for getting the job done.

As winter approached, Murray acquired a fearsome arsenal of assault rifles, including a Bushmaster XM-15 ("Beltway Sniper" John Lee Malvo's weapon of choice) and an AK-47. At a local UPS store where Murray maintained a mailbox, employees observed that he was ordering "boxes and boxes" of ammunition. Murray's bogus tales of preparing to deploy with the Marines quelled whatever suspicions burned-out UPS employees might have had. Meanwhile, Murray's parents, who were adept at ferreting secular media material from his desk drawers, had no idea his stockpile even existed.

One way to express the power of the gun culture in America society is that it was a logical place for Matthew Murray to move after leaving the religious right. Given that most progressives like myself refuse to participate in the gun culture and therefore have little "feel" for it ourselves, we have a difficult time understanding its attraction to millions of other Americans. If we are going to be an attractive option to disaffected Christians like Matthew Murray, we need to be more interested and effective in addressing people like him.

Let me be clear. I don't think that progressives should stop opposing the religious right. It's important that we do so. Likewise, I don't think a "better progressivism" would have saved Matthew Murray from becoming a mass murderer. But Max Blumenthal's article on Matthew Murray does contain themes that should give progressives pause and lead us to think about our own limitations and weaknesses as well as those of the religious right.

The First Four Theses Against Progressives

Talk about being fed up--the big names of the journalistic left have been firing at the Obama administration with everything they have. Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, and Digby all speak with one mouth even as they condemn President Obama's approach to health reform. Obama's "weak" and getting "rolled" by the blue dogs and their corporate allies. Obama's betraying progressives on health reform the same way he betrayed progresives on the financial bailout and secrecy. Obama's going to abandon the "public option" and turn health reform into a bonanza for the health insurance companies. Obama's betraying the "progressive base" that drove him to victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election. Finally, progressives condemn Obama for losing the initiative because he's not as ideological and partisan as they are.

Actually, I should say as partisan as "we are." I count myself as a progressive blogger, read the better-known progressive bloggers, and admire their smarts, passion, and talent. I also agree with them on most issues. Like Greenwald, I'm disappointed that Obama has maintained most of the secrecy policies of the Bush administration. Not unlike Krugman, I think the bank bailout is a set-up for the next financial crisis, and want to see Obama aggressively employ the tax system to reduce wealth differentials. Yesterday, I blogged yet again about the criminal culpability of Dick Cheney and the other major figures of the Bush administration. I also want to see socialized medicine in the United States just as much as Dennis Kucinich or anybody else on the left.

But I'm also starting to think that progressive commentators are way off base about the Obama administration. Worse, there are certain ways in which the progressive commentariat is making it more rather than less difficult to enact fundamental health reform.

In other words, I'm starting to get fed up with some of the rigid ways in which progressives are fed up with Obama.

Here's my four theses on progressives.

1. Progressives Are Not "the Base." The Democratic Party has a diverse voting base among largely white progressives, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and union members. Those progressives who view themselves as "the" Democratic base are deluding themselves. Obama won the nomination primarily by appealing to moderate and conservative Democrats in caucus states. Obama won the election because he was able to keep moderate and conservative Dems in the fold while appealing to independents. Progressive Democrats may have been necessary to Obama's victory, but other Democratic constituencies were even more necessary. Just like the Republicans, Democratic progressives have a hard time internalizing the extent to which minority support was crucial to Obama's victory.

2. Progressives are One-Trick Ponies. Progressives are primarily playing the defensive role of maintaining the “public option” as part of Obama's proposals. That means attacking the Obama administration, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, Tom Daschle, the mainstream media and anybody on the Democratic side who's wavering on the public option. By they're so focused on that one point that progressives are doing very little if anything to actually promote the public option concept to the broader American public. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find almost nothing in TPM, HuffPost, or other progressive outlets about how the public option would work, what kind of federal agency would be set up, why (beyond "it won't need to make a profit") the public option would drive down costs, and why the public option doesn't necessarily lead to "socialized medicine." The Obama people have tried to discuss the public option, but their ideas are falling on deaf ears in the progressive as well as the mainstream media.

3. Progressives keep the health care debate "white." Outside the Obama people and the Congressional leadership of both parties, the three main poles of debate are the right, the Blue Dogs, and progressives. Outside that one guy with the AR 15 in Phoenix, the right is monolithically white; the Blue Dogs even more so. Needless to say, progressives aren't that white. Bob Herbert, Eugene Robinson, and Clarence Page come to mind as well-known op-ed writers who are progressives. Pam Spaulding of "Pam's House Blend" also gets considerable play on the big progressive blogs. But the fact is that African-American, Hispanic, and gay perspectives only have token representation (if that) in the progressive media and there are times when I think the progressive media is about as interested in minority views and interests as George Bush was interested in astro-physics. The health care debate has become a debate among the white population and the progressive media bears significant responsibility for keeping the health care debate "white."

4. The Progressive Media Has No Self-Awareness. It almost goes without saying that progressive outlets like Media Matters, ThinkProgress, HuffPost, and TPM are saturated with media criticism. This is so much the case that well-traveled media figures like Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper are probably better known in some progressive households than in their own. But the progressive media shows almost no awareness of its own growing impact. There's no little or no analysis in the progressive media of its general significance as a media voice, it's impact on specific issues like health care or torture, which progressive outlets have preponderant influence, or what influence the progressive media has on the mainstream media, the Obama administration, and the Congressional Democrats. In other words, the progressive media shows almost no self-awareness. By comparison, conservative media shows like Limbaugh's and Hannity's are bastions of self-understanding.