The Left Ascendant

Rod writes, of the Taibbi discussion:

To be clear, I don't believe that we're going to see a left-right fusion of any sort. The value I see in Taibbi's essay is his sense that the left doesn't have a lot to offer now -- that it's populated by a bunch of cranks and juveniles who are great at whining and complaining, but who don't offer much practical help. Ross has said that it's ridiculous for a leftie like Taibbi to complain about the worthlessness of the left when everything's coming up roses for them in advance of the 2008 election.

I just don't see this. If Ross is right, would he have instructed the disillusioned rightists of The American Conservative to quit complaining about conservatives in 2004, because the GOP was doing well at the polls?

I should have been clearer in my earlier comments. I don't just think that the left is doing well politically; I think that they may get the chance to enact a pretty substantial and wide-ranging policy agenda if things go well for them in '08. Taibbi (and Rod) think liberals don't have anything substantive to offer; I think that's plain wrong, and it's a dangerous delusion for conservatives, in particular, to entertain. True, what the left has to offer now is roughly the same thing it offered in the 1970s and '80s, which is to say a dramatic expansion of the welfare state - but the ideas for how to go about this are much sharper than they used to be, thanks to years in the wilderness and a greater appreciation for free markets, and the political climate is a lot more favorable to a renewed push for social democracy than it was in, say, 1979. If Taibbi disagrees with this agenda, fine, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't, and that's what makes his whinging so irritating: He's trotting out warmed-over Thomas Frank, kvetching about how the DLC made the Democrats "sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street" and how "no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs" in a year when (as Matt points out) the Dems have moved so far toward the "progressive" wing of the party that Hillary Clinton, the rightward-most of the leading candidates, is running well to the left of John Kerry in 2004.

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Dems have moved so far toward the "progressive" wing of the party that Hillary Clinton, the rightward-most of the leading candidates, is running well to the left of John Kerry in 2004.

On foreign policy. On domestic policy, it's less clear. Edwards health care plan is somewhat to the left of Kerry's. Obama's is about where Kerry's was: cover all kids, provide catastrophic reinsurance, etc, pay or play but no guarantee of universality, etc. I suspect Hillary's will be somwhat to the right of Kerry.

On other economic issues everyone is basically where Kerry is. Free trade, but with more "enforcement of labor an environment standards" or what not. Roll back top Bush tax cuts. Obama and Edwards have made some noises about treating cap gains as income, but hell, Chuck Grassley is already on board with that.

Outside of health care, neither Obama nor Clinton seem to have an appetite for drastically expanding the welfare state. Most everything is small bore: more money into transportation & job training for TANF recipients, some more Americorps members, a bit more of this, a bit more of that, etc. Of course, that's fine by a lot of people: "Clintonism, only with real universal healthcare and more support for unions", combined with opposition to the Iraq war, will make a lot of people happy.

There's no left+right alliance brewing, except insofar as the left can sell "flexicurity" as a free-market approach to inequality. There's just a left+center-right alliance. At the moment, however, very few federal Republicans reflect this center-right. Lots of state & local Republicans do, though (Pawlenty, Huckabee, probably some of the other governors).

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | June 20, 2007 3:19 PM

The left also enjoys the benefits of some lefty successes elsewhere in the world. Nationalized health care in most other advanced countries has some clear benefits over our systems here. Those other systems are also mature enough for us to evaluate their benefits and deficiencies. I would wager that a universal health care system would not be on the table here if we didn't already have competent systems in place (Australia, France, etc) in other places in the globe. The fact that Europe hasn't collapsed under it's health and welfare state is a powerful example for American lefties. What examples outside our borders do the right point to to reinforce their ideology?

Posted by Citizen (World) | June 20, 2007 3:34 PM

Hillary Clinton is the "Senator from Punjab," but Barack Obama is no better.

Both Clinton and Obama support the third-world (i.e. cheap labor) invasion of the U.S., and thus both are arch-enemies of the American Middle Class.

Big business is using legal and illegal immigration to drive down American wages.

The worst thing to happen to the American worker is the marriage of big business and multiculturalism. Liberals like Obama and Clinton can completely screw over the middle class but then justify it by saying it's "multicultural."

They are both in league with big business. And as Harvard labor economist George Borjas says, big business is using legal and illegal immigration to drive down American wages.

Has the Democratic Party declared war upon the American Middle Class?

I'd vote Republican before I'd vote for a Democrat weak on immigration.

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Posted by David T. | June 20, 2007 4:45 PM

I've been reading Taibbi's stuff for a while now, going back to his "the Exile" days, and he is a member of "the left" only in the sense that he detests people on the right slightly more. He is hardly representative of most American liberals. He speaks for the left in the same sense that Steve Sailer speaks for the right. Taibbi is basically an anarchist anti-authoritarian with some fascistic leanings. His politics are basically what your typical hard-core punk rocker believed circa 1985.

Posted by vanya | June 21, 2007 10:26 AM

So, after 12 years of dominant control in Congress, 6 years of one party rule, including a war-time president who had enormous popularity thanks to an unprecedented attack on our country, your side has achieved... what, exactly? Rolling back a welfare state that was already collapsing under its own weight, which was only practically possible because of truly incredible economic growth (which came during a Democratic administration)... and what else? Abortion? Legal in every state. Gay marriage and civil unions? Being performed today, in the US, and showing signs of spreading. The death penalty? Being performed less and less often, as more states adopt moratoriums or simply stop administering without issuing outright bans. Shrinking the government? Well, no. You controlled the Presidency, the Congress, the judiciary, a majority of the gubernatorial seats, and vast swaths of the media. And what do you have to show for it? An enormous deficit, the worst international reputation in our country's history, and Iraq.

And we're the ones with nothing to offer? Right.

Posted by Freddie | June 21, 2007 10:34 AM

"World Citizen"
But even the left wing of the left wing isn't naive enough to suppose that the "successes" of nationalized healthcare et al elsewhere result entirely from domestic conditions. A fair amount of the reason that Western Europe can continue to fund its welfare state despite it's burgeoning demographic problem is because it cashed in its peace dividend. No, not the one supposedly offered by the fall of the Soviet Union. Rather the dividend afforded them when it became clear that we would shoulder the financial burden of policing the world. As for universal healthcare, how much higher would their burdens be, and how much more vexing their choices, if they could not simply extort low-price drugs from the pharmaceutical companies by threatening to genericize the products (as Brazil did). Could we do the same? Sure, but see how quickly R&D would dry up, unless of course the state assumed the overwhelming share of funding. While there are certainly instances of other countries of a left-leaning bent succeeding to greater or lesser degrees at provisioning healthcare and other social programs, little of this occurs in a vacuum.

Posted by Anonymous Conservative | June 22, 2007 5:51 PM

Freddie,
Ross was not making the simple point that the right has substantially more to offer than the left, the converse of which you sneeringly supplied. Rather he was pointing out that much of what it has to offer is a rehash of unsuccessful Democratic platforms of a quarter-century ago. With the exception of what you would likely term progress (for the most part I would agree with the use of the term) on gay rights and some issues like stem cell research that didn't exist in a meaningful capacity at that point, there is nothing in the likely Democratic platform that would have looked remotely out of place in 1979. Why? The short answer is that there really isn't anywhere else to go. A quarter century of economic prosperity has helped people to forget what redistributive social democracy felt like. The irony is that you have almost the converse of the situation in France, where the left has held sway, officially or otherwise, for as long as anyone can remember and so free market solutions are deemed revolutionary.

Posted by Anonymous Conservative | June 22, 2007 6:05 PM

I'd like to see how the nationalized health care systems of France, etc., would fare without the medical breakthroughs of the for-profit US system. it's no accident that the US, not France or Canada, mapped the human genome.

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