The base and the superstructure

Interesting to hear about the parallels between the US and Australia. (Like most Americans, I know little about anything outside my immediate vicinity – blame it on our shoddy public education!)

Somewhat related: For years I’ve been inflamed that queers keep voting Democrat – despite the Party’s vocal opposition to us. Obama stated clearly during his campaign that he did not support our right to marry – but the majority of my lefty acquaintances insist that he had to say this to get elected. I see no reason to have doubted his word on it. If he says he thinks marriage should only be between and a man and a woman – I believe him! And lo he backed up that statement with his policy positions while in office. His administration has finally stopped actively working to defend DODT and DOMA – but it seems to me that was an inevitable result of enormous public and pressure and changing international realities, and would have happened under a Republican just as easily. Fill in poor people, union members, activists, students, old people, immigrants, the medically undeserved, etc for queers, and I think you can generalize that the Democratic leadership basically doesn’t like most of us. Yet we go back and vote for their tired asses every time.

Finally – I live in California, and because of the electoral college and my state’s method of apportioning electoral votes, I’ve always been able to vote for Green or other third party candidates – at least in presidential elections – with the knowledge that I’m not “spoiling” anything for my homophobic Democratic candidates. My state always goes Democrat. I’m a little excited that there’s a move afoot to award our electoral votes to the popular majority, but kind of bummed that I may then feel compelled to vote for the people who hate me. That’s politics I guess!

Thanks for the interesting post.

“Of course, income equality is an important goal in its own right, but the challenge in terms of social mobility is to understand the key components of a more mobile society which do not appear to be related to simple measures of income equality.”

“Of course, we’re going to mention equality of outcome, because we’d be laughed out of court if we didn’t, but the challenge for us is to ignore it from now on…”

‘“sharing the values of every day Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation.”’

Love of family and nation?????.

FWIW: ‘The Republicans are getting scarier and crazier, so much so that any repeat of a Nader-style strategy is unthinkable. ‘

I think this is a disastrous mistake. The only way to put pressure on the Democrats is to let them believe that unless they tack to the Left, they will lose their votes to a third party, and the reason I know this is that this is what happened in the early 1930s (a time when, contrary to popular belief, the Republicans were no less batshit crazy than they are now, and the economics situation was, if anything, even more perilous). The only decent Government the US has had in the 20th century was the first term of FDR and in this situation, FDR had to be continually tacking to the Left to ‘cut off’ the threat of Huey Long who (at the time) was perceived as being the more ‘radical’, ‘leftist’ alternative.

Or a blunter way of putting it: ‘I was convinced we’d have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I’m a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none – a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.’

If American elites genuinely thought that a third party, ‘socialist’ was about to win power (or might win power) they would quickly put pressure on whichever puppet they controlled at the time to throw some meat to the crowd. It wouldn’t be much, but it would be something. The problem with the previous elections was not that too many people voted for Nader but that too few voted for him. The Democratic elite* will always hate him because he ‘stole’ votes of theirs that were apparently given to them by God, but if it had looked as if he was going to become a genuine ‘third force’ in politics they would have to ‘tack to the left’ to neutralise the threat (or else have him shot ha ha ha).

This would have to be jut the first stage of course. As anyone can see the American political system is broken and it needs an overhaul even more radical than that of FDR’s first term to even begin to halt the long American decline (assuming one accepts that that is a desirable goal).

*And no, I know this wouldn’t be enough. It would have to be a pincer movement. The Democratic elite would rather see the Republicans in power than lose their power over ‘their’ party. But it would put pressure on them.

Agree that it is lip service, Phil, but the rest of what you write makes no sense. Assuming your identification of income equality with equality of outcome, where’s the evidence that Tories who fail to play lip service to equality _as a goal_ are laughed out of court? Especially since many _on the left_ reject it as a goal in favour of priority to the least advantaged, sufficiency etc. Most Tories (and not a few Lib Dems) have rejected it as a goal, on principle. That’s why the inclusion is bizarre.

Especially since many on the left reject it as a goal in favour of priority to the least advantaged, sufficiency etc.

Not to drag this off at a tangent, but I think you must mean ‘many of the left side of Anglo-American political philosophy’. AAPP places a very high value on logical consistency, doesn’t it, which makes rejecting things other people are attached to as goals a popular activity and route to fame and fortune. I’d assume that in everyday politics you can get away with holding inconsistent views much of the time, so there’s much more of tendency for everyone to pay lip service to pretty much anything (that significant numbers of people value) and it’s a better career strategy.

(At least I’d thought this was true of many right-wing politicans in Britain: probably the American ones are more confrontational.)

Take your point engels, but there are right-wing politicians in the UK who are reasonably literate in political philosophy. I’m sure that if you ask Oliver Letwin, for example, whether he thinks income inequality is desirable as a goal, he’ll say no. Ditto quite a few others, and, in an earlier generation, Sir Keith Joseph (who was fond of recycling Wilt Chamberlain).

Didn’t we have this discussion before engels, and wasn’t the answer Stephen Byers iirc?

Quite possibly!

OK, I have a Modest Proposal: American leftists should join the Republican Party, then organize and vote, en masse, for Ron Paul. Why? He is going to be the only Peace candidate available. Yes, he’d probably do a lot of things we would find onerous, but so will Obama and every future Democratic President who has already been born.

If RP could do just one thing–end the endless wars–that would free up (IIRC) something on the order of 700 million dollars a day for other purposes, or to appease the deficit hawks so that we don’t have to gut Social Security or abandon our infrastructure. If he would take a budget axe to the Pentagon, so much the better.

I think it’s quite possible that ending wars could be a thing only Republicans can do, in a “Nixon goes to China” sense. If a Democrat tries to end a war, he or she is a chickenshit hippie tryin’ t’ cut an’ run. If a Republican does it–like when Reagan tucked America’s tail between its legs and pulled the Marines out of Lebanon after a couple hundred of them got killed by a truck bomb–then there’s nothing but crickets.

Since leaving Iraq, Afghanistan, and however many other countries we have “boots on the ground” in by Inauguration Day, 2013 will not cause roses to bloom in the countries we’ve left, the tribalist macho types will confidently assert that “we” could have won if only “we” had grown a pair, manned up [insert any other sexist terminology desired], and stayed, Democrat politicians know that they and their successors would be wearing the millstone of “weakling cut-and-run lib’ruls who hate America and don’t want Our Troops(tm) to win” for generations to come, as they still do to this day. For that matter, it did, literally, take Nixon to be the one to end American involvement in Vietnam.

If Ron Paul could get us out of our various Imperial adventures with some kind of mumbled “peace with honor,” he would be doing our country, and the victims of our invasions a great favor.

Rolling back the police state, the War On (Some) Drugs, etc. would probably likewise require a Republican. If there’s an “R” after the name, the macho tribalists will have a harder time howling that such policies are not sufficiently “tough” on ter’rism, crime, hippies, etc..

Of course, with Ron Paul, as with any other politician, the question is how many of his stated principles will he abide by once in power? But heck, we’re going to be lied to and betrayed by the Democrats anyway–might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. We know we’ll get zilch from the Democrats, and the Greens can’t get elected (so also, zilch). With the libertarian-Republicans, at least there’s a chance we’ll get a few big ticket items on our list–peace, rollback of the surveillance state, an end to or moderation of the War on (Some) Drugs.

One more thing it would do is make leftists a bloc for the two parties to actually compete over. The Dems know that the Progressive base can’t get their policies implemented by the Greens, so they don’t have to worry too much about us defecting to them. The Democratic leadership will still get their (Republican) policies adopted by the Republicans. Losing an election or two doesn’t really hurt them that much, as long as they know their base will have to come slinking back with heads hung low as their only hope from getting some moonbat AmeriTaliban Republican elected next time around.

But if Progressives have the prospect of getting some of their agenda items pushed through by the libertarian wing of the Republican party–and hence, the prospect that they might stay there–then the Democrats have reason to try to win us back by outcompeting the Republicans in supporting Progressive views.

The only other idea I can think of is to get some radicals of our own to counterbalance the Overton Window-pushing of the Tea Party. So maybe, scary-looking mobs of people marching through the streets carrying giant pictures of Buckminster Fuller and copies of Critical Path clutched to their chests demanding that we stop making money and start making sense instead. :)

The Greenwald thesis is a bit too narrow.
He takes one point that is undoubtably true: in general elections in a two-party system in which one party is crazy, a responsible left-leaning voter has no choice but to vote for the less crazy party, even if the less crazy party enjoys left-bashing. He then seems to view this as a general political paradox for left leaning voters. Not so, for several reasons.
First, there are primary elections, in which a responsible left-leaning voter can vote for good politicians. This vote would be meaningful if the voter’s preference was backed by money and infrastructure: a kind of party within a party. Second, there is an intellectual milieu, which is influenced by but scarcely controlled by the established media. I’ve been noticing some encouraging signs here: the emergence of a credible left voice that supplants the dippy-granola left voice of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Well… there’s a rather significant stumbling block to this, which is that the Democrats lost rather massively in the 2010 elections. The GOP controls the House of Representatives, and did rather well in local and state elections. So it’s not as though the left is simply sitting in power without meaningful opposition.

Nor do I think Obama’s win in 2008 had much to do with civil rights. In fact he’d probably increase his approval numbers right now if he announced KSM’s immediate deportation to Afghanistan – by cruise missile.

And the base wants Obama to expend more political capital in a losing struggle to try KSM in civilian court? This, while there’s a massive budget battle underway, and health care reform is far from safe?

The problem with the base isn’t that it gets kicked by the Democratic Party. The problem with the base is that it can’t quite grasp that “winning” means “you get some of what you want, given the limits of political reality.”

Don’t misunderstand me; the base SHOULD speak loudly about what it thinks is right. Where it goes a little nutty is deciding that Obama is “kicking them” and that this is all happening because they’re not tough enough. They’re long on indignation about Obama’s decision, and absolutely bereft of any strategic wisdom as to alternatives.

Isn’t this just the basic problem of any politics? You want something, but don’t have enough support to get it. So you have to engage in coalitions. And if the others in that colaition need you less than you need them, you won’t get too much out of the coalition.

You need to broaden the popularity of your ideas, or make sure people need you more. Become a big part of the infrastructure of the coalition, make it rely on your supporters, without doing too much damage to the coalition as a whole.

I’m with StevenAttewell @7. After all, we’ve already seen how successfully the far right applied the same strategy wrt the Republican Party. In a rigged two-party system it’s really the only game in town, as frustrating as it is to acknowledge that. But it took the wingers a decade or more to complete their coup, so don’t expect instant gratification.

For starters, a little leadership wouldn’t hurt. As long as we have a president who caves to almost anything the opposition demands in the name of being transformative, we lose.

Second, we have to work much harder to change the basic frame of the public discussion – again, if we had someone in the White House who . . . . The Right dominates the conversation and makes it all about taxes and spending. The public has largely forgotten that it was tax cuts and deregulation that created this disaster (not to mention putting two wars on the national credit card). There is little discussion of the impact of the spending cuts being proposed, or the fact that the Ryan plan, for example, is the same old rancid wine in a new bottle. No, no, he’s being lauded as “courageous.”

At the end of the day, you’re all pussies. Nobody with an ounce of balls or self-respect would let themselves be treated the way liberals let the Democrats treat them. I don’t give a shit how scary you think Republicans are, people that are worth listening to don’t let other people treat them this way. You’re cowards. You’re weak. You’re pathetic. You’re wimps. You’re nothing. Even when you’re right, nobody gives a shit what you have to say because you don’t even have the instincts required to stand up for yourselves.

THAT is your problem. You are too afraid of Republicans to be of any use to anybody.

Macho posturing may be emotionally satisfying but it’s no substitute for the kind of long hard slog by which the right took over the Republican party.

Running your mouth (or fingers) is no substitute for getting in the trenches.

Landru: “Coincidence? You tell me. But, whatever the causality may be I think that the people who educated this current, failing, worse-than-useless generation of the establishment press have a lot to answer for. CT’ers are often saying that proper teaching of humanities is important for society to prosper, and I agree. But the flip side is that humanities teachers have to take the blame for poor performance—what was it that went so wrong for these students’ education in the 1980’s and 1990’s?”

Considering how one-sided this is – almost always protecting the economic elites – I don’t think that the explanation lies in deconstructionism.

Also, just in case you haven’t noticed, money has always found large numbers of liars for hire.

PHB @ 23

The Obama administration has rolled back vast swaths of Bush era abuse in the executive branch.

Name me six.

Soullite@32

At the end of the day, you’re all pussies. …. You’re cowards. You’re weak. You’re pathetic. You’re wimps. You’re nothing. Even when you’re right, nobody gives a shit what you have to say because you don’t even have the instincts required to stand up for yourselves.

THAT is your problem. You are too afraid of Republicans to be of any use to anybody.

JQ is an Australian. CB is British. Lots of people who read and comment here are – gasp – not American. Fwiw, I’m British and live in Turkey.

It’s quite possible that we are in fact the people who are to blame for the messed up nature of the American political system. But I’d like at least a hint of the mechanism that you think is involved there.

For decades now, sententious American Tories like Walter Lippmann have tearfully reminded us that no matter our hopes, revolutions will inevitably eat their own children.

Our revolution too, it seems — although it has taken a while. As Bob Dylan put it 40+ years ago:

I pity the poor immigrant, when his gladness comes to pass.

The Left’s problems are due to a rhetorical deficiency coming from a lack of coherent intellectual framework.

On the Right, there are short books that bring the message in a nutshell: The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom. They are short, and they are rhetorically comprehensive. Both of these traits are paramount. On the Left, no such works exist.

The intellectual framework of the Right is market liberalism. There is no such intellectual framework on the Left.

Even so, the outlines of it are staring everyone in the face: You must develop a positive justification of government spending and regulatory activity by fully cost/benefitting the social value of the spending and the regulations, in terms of future externalities that are avoided, and future transaction costs that are reduced. That cost/benefit would include ALL the things that aren’t monetized: your own future savings in time and energy everywhere, and the preservation of all the little wildlife creatures, for example. The value of that, annually, is likely be a magnitude larger that the GDP.

Also, those who wish to defeat the Right must adopt a DUAL outlook, both intellectually and rhetorically: supporting both markets and government together.

The following two things are formally equivalent: (1) technology and (2) institutions. They are both contexts, ruling over transformations/transactions. They occur on different hierarchical levels.

Market competition provides the basic way to technological innovation and the best possible consumer goods. A parallel framework is needed to explicitly verbalize the study and revamping of obsolete institutions, in order to match the function of innovation of technology in response to markets. Government failure and business management failure are likely to have parallel subtopics.

Put this all in a short comprehensive book for the average reader, and the game is won.

There is no such short book, and the only comprehensive one is: Building a Win-Win World by Hazel Henderson (1996), an independent futurist who was at the OTA and NSF in the 1970’s. Read this book: you will be astonished at what she already understood, decades before anyone. She is well-known to the conferences of NGO’s, but she should be celebrated by the entire world. She has been learning from everybody and she knows just about everything. It is both theoretical and practical. Read it!

The Left’s problems are due to a rhetorical deficiency coming from a lack of coherent intellectual framework.

In my opinion they come from too much rhetoric, too much intellectualization, and far too little rolling up the sleeves and doing the tedious ground-level political scutwork. As I keep pointing out, the model lies right in front of our eyes in the form of the far-right takeover of the Republican Party. It’s been done and it can be done on the other side, too.

You can articulate till you’re blue in the face, and publish as many books as you like, but if the only people who wield actual power are hostile to your ideas, you’ll lose every time. The only way to remedy that is to replace them.

Why are you so sure that it can be done – now, under the current circumstances?

More people seem to have more free time.

I agree with Steve – the right didn’t take over the GOP due to reading Hayek and Friedman. If there were any books involved, they’d be far, far lower on the intellectual hierarchy.

By “them” I mean county committee persons, not just candidates for office. As long as the insurgents are broadly on the progressive page, intellectual framework counts for less than zero compared to plain old showing up.

If you weren’t so busy being scared of Republicans, then maybe you’d understand that you should be afraid of the Democrats, too. There is no real difference between them unless you’re black or gay.

Actually, there’s no difference if you are black or gay. Democrats have contributed to affirmative action rollbacks, increased prison spending, cut eduction, cut public welfare programs, stood firm on homophobic policies around marriage and the military, and have generally behaved like the social conservatives they are. I’m unclear at this point what on earth Democrats do stand for, besides being Republican light!

The Left’s biggest problem is the Right, which is getting lethal in its determination to destroy any trace of the New Deal. (I’m talking about the US here).

Oddly, I wasn’t even thinking about the Tea Party but about the post -Goldwater takeover that led to Reagan. But indeed, we have a very fresh example right before our eyes.

the only reason that it’s not the #1 topic of conversation on the Left is because of self-designated Leftists who either consider it boring or beneath them or less worthy than street protest because they prefer the purity of impotence to the messy reality of exercising power.

But didn’t the tea party too start with street protests, and only after gaining much publicity and notoriety, after becoming a movement, they’ve become influential in party politics? This model will not work for the left in the current climate, for various reasons, but mostly because of the media. There is no symmetry: the tea party operates along the lines of the dominant ideology; any left movement would have to fight the headwind.

But didn’t the tea party too start with street protests, and only after gaining much publicity and notoriety, after becoming a movement, they’ve become influential in party politics?

The protests- mostly with very unimpressive turnout despite the MSM hype- were window dressing. The precinct-level organizing is where the action is.

The street protests were ultimately more of a marketing gimmick/recruiting opportunity; the Tea Party made a very quick turn into party politics. The point here is that the Left has been doing much bigger protests for a lot longer, but we don’t make that turn from “hold a protest” to “take over local party.”

At the end of the day, I don’t think the media is that crucial. Steve LaBonne’s example of the Goldwaterites is quite appropriate. In 1964, Goldwaterites were pilloried throughout the media as having the temerity to step outside of the Overton Window – in the long run, it didn’t stop them in the slightest.

On a side note, I’d actually argue that the Left has done something similar to this with the infilitration of Dean supporters into the party post-2004. We didn’t take it to the full extent, and I’d argue that the entire Obama campaign was actively counter-productive in that it generated an enormous wave of mobilization entirely outside the party that has since withered on the OFA vine, but I think people really do forget how different Democratic Party politics was in, say, 2002.

Steve Attewell @ 62
Are you saying that protests and marches could be used in recruiting supporters of a new faction within the Democratic Party, or am I misunderstanding you?

After six years of living on the West Coast, I’ve become agnostic on the Steve/Steven thing.

Yes. That’s what I’m saying should have been happening all along. And there is precedent for this in the history of the Party – “Get Clean for Gene” for white anti-war folks, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for black civil rights folks, etc.

Hi, I’ve been a long time reader of this very fascinating blog. This is my first postt, please be gentle.

Steven Attewell at 2 and elsewhere, I’m in agreement with you on this issue but I think its important to point out that the American left isn’t exactly in a unique situation from a historical standpoint. This isn’t the first time in American history where some factions of the American left expressed disdain for party politics. It happened in the late Gilded Age and it wasn’t till the Progressive Era that the notion of party politics gained some popularity among the American left. Even then, many were still opposed. It seems to be a recurring story in American politics. Something to do with purity probably.

Only wanted to add: The bait and switch element in Obama (which lots of us tried to resist but couldn’t entirely) of it seems to me to amplify our frustration and despair.

LeeEsq:

Quite right. As for where it comes from, I think there are multiple sources:
1. Liberal individualism. In this philosophy, politics is supposed to emerge from the individual voter’s rational deliberation, as an individual expression. Parties, as collective organizations that deal in power, in ideology and emotion, are corruptive influences and those who engage in them have lost their independence. Hence, the widespread pattern of habitual Democratic voters registering as “Decline to State” or “Independent” because they don’t want to be labeled, man, even though it dramatically decreases their influence over who gets nominated, and therefore, the range of possibilities for them to vote for.
2. Latent evangelism, emerging out of the anti-nuclear and civil rights movement (see Maurice Isserman’s If I Had a Hammer). Here, the purpose of politics is to bear individual moral witness to injustice through an act of physical sacrifice (ideally). In this framework, the consequences of one’s actions are secondary – the important thing is to cleanse yourself of guilt and sin in the eyes of God and/or History. If victory is to come, then it comes through moral suasion rather than political organization. Hence, let’s protest because it might get our heads beat in and that will purify us, engaging in party politics might involve compromising our ideals, and should be avoided.
3. Vanguardist radicalism. The system is inherently corrupt and can’t be reformed, so let’s not bother to try. In fact, trying and succeeding would be bad, because it might convince people that reformism can work, leading to co-optation. Not trying allows us to take the purest, most radical stance possible without having to think about the realities of implementation because we’ll never ever have power (until the millennium comes). It also allows you to have a lot of fun infiltrating, “heightening the contradictions,” and generally making life difficult for stuffy reformist types. Hence, well, the black mask attention-hoggers at every damn protest in the last twenty-thirty years.

Seems to me there is no real conflict between the two choices facing US liberals. Liberals in this case meaning anyone against torture, for the rule of law, for politicians keeping campaign promises, etc.

Some say liberals shouldn’t vote for Obama, and some say liberals should try to take over the party, perhaps starting with a primary challenge. I say do both. Join the party, try to kick the bums out, then campaign for Nader. Seems to me the only rational choice until the elected Democrats make at least token efforts to not sell out as soon as they get a fucking office.

“rents caused more economic inefficiency than they do now”

I’d like to see that bit of economic theory laid out.

This is a titanic predicament. Essentially, now that ruling and opposition parties are growing essentially identical, democracy has become an irrelevance, simply the charade which the far left always said it was. (To be precise, the far left had a point in the 1960s, was fairly sensible in the 1980s, and is absolutely incontestably correct now.)

But then what? Look, in South Africa we have a government which has been taken over by big business, and an opposition which always has been under the control of big business. Because the government has been corrupted by big business, there are calls for us to vote for the opposition because it might be less corrupt. There is absolutely no evidence for this, but big business controls the media and thus the idea gets pushed. Furthermore, the blatant corruption of the government drives people to want to vote for the opposition.

The problem is in the notion that voting makes a difference, it would appear. In reality, assuming that the ruling class has taken over both parties in a two-party system, you need a new party, one which is not controlled by the ruling class. But unfortunately, with the ever-increasing wealth and power of the fuling class [ruling class — Molesworthian Freudian slip], a new party will almost inevitably become controlled by the ruling class. This happened very quickly in Zimbabwe with the MDC; in South Africa it took a dozen years for the ANC to be completely corrupted, but the point is that nobody at street level wanted either party to be corrupted, and yet neither Zimbabweans nor South Africans seemed able to prevent this. And certainly there is no possibility of changing a party back once it has sold out. (Or is there any evidence that this has ever happened? I know of none.)

To sum up, we are screwed unless there is a revolution, which doesn’t seem to be on the cards (and alas, we need a global revolution, not just a few shots fired in Benghazi).

It’s not a left wing party at all. It is run by people who actually believe in free market capitalism, and who actually believe in American imperialism overseas.

The basic dynamic is that the Northeastern elite can’t countenance being in the same party as the Southern hillbillies, so they are always in opposite parties. Whether the party is Democratic or Republican is beside the point. This is one of the reasons that if you look at the College Democrats, the clubs tend to become progressive more squishy and conservative as you move from third-tier State U to the Ivy League. For a lot of Americans, being a Democrat is as automatic as it is for certain Englishmen being Tories; it actually expresses agreement with the status quo.

Myles at 80 made a very important observation when he noted that “being a Democrat is as automatic as it is for certain Englishmen to be Tories.” This is the true base of the Democratic Party and these automatic Democrats include people who are all over the place ideologically. The Democratic base are people who can be counted upon to regularly vote Democratic regardless of their ideology in primaries and general elections. Liberals/progressives/leftists are part of this base and have to fight/compromise with the other parts of the Democratic base for influence.

Liberals/progressives/leftists are part of this base and have to fight/compromise with the other parts of the Democratic base for influence.

This is why I find the whole thing about degree (or lack) of leftism in the Democratic Party so inane. It’s not a left-wing party because there aren’t very many American left-wingers. American has almost no socialists; even social democracy is a relatively non-mainstream position.

The basic fallacy of people like Daily Kos or whatever is to presume that inside most Americans there’s a social democrat wanting to get out. No there isn’t, just as inside every gook there isn’t an American trying to get out. Why do Americans give consistently progressive answer on telephone polls, then? Because it is the Republic of Nice.

By the way, isn’t this the same as the Lib Dem problem? The activists are to the left of the MP’s, and the MP’s are the left of the voters. In the Democratic party, it’s the same. So of course people feel disappointed.

(The Republican party is genuinely frightening in the sense that their Congressmen might actually be as right-wing as any crazed activist.)

Does anyone have any ideas why this might be?

The problem is that the party itself is not the immutable element: the immutable element is the centrist, squishy-liberal crowd, as evidenced by that list. If the Democrats moved seriously leftward, you can be sure that either a) they won’t win presidential elections because of the centrist/elite flip, as in 1980; or b) if they persisted, they would cease being one of the two major parties, with a centrist party springing up with all the Google/Citigroup/whatever money to take their place.

It’s much better just to view the party as a continental crust floating above the mantle., and nothing more.

#78: Your opening sentence is not a description of what is going on in the US. The parties are not, in any sense at all, identical. The Republican party is composed entirely of crazed extremists and people whose primary mission is low taxes for the rich.

You can think that the Democrats have been compromised by corporate interests and you’d have a good case. But that’s not the same thing. And it is that difference – the truly frightening nature of the opposition – that makes sitting it out, or third parties, such an utterly toxic alternative.

They’re trying to remove Medicare and Medicaid; the right to unions; pensions; any social safety net. How the hell can you look at what the Republicans are trying to do in the US today and think that it’s A-OK to let them run things to heighten the contradiction?

Some observations….

1. Those who frame the argument in terms of how much the left should be involved in electoral politics are asking the wrong question. As at least some of this conversation makes clear, it’s not just a question of how much, but of how. Elect Democrats and hope to pressure them at some later date (this seems like the dominant strategy in the US)? Support third-party efforts? Attempt to take over the Democratic Party?

2. Despite being a long-time registered Independent and sometime third-party activist, I have some sympathy for the StevenAttewell’s take-over-the-Democrats line, if only in the spirit of trying anything once. He and other supporters of this view are entirely correct that the success of conservatism in the US was built on taking over one of the major parties. I’d add, however, something that hasn’t been emphasized enough: any attempt to take over the Democrats would only work if it were coordinated. That is, this is not just a question of a bunch of individual “leftists” going to precinct meetings on their own. And this highlights another fact: electoral and non-electoral politics are not entirely separate from each other. Taking over the Democratic Party is of course designed to have electoral consequences. But much of the organizing needed to do that (if that were even possible) would look more like non-electoral politics.

3. The two parties are not entirely isomorphic. The GOP has always tended to have more ideological unity than the Democratic Party. This–in addition to a variety of social-structural factors–makes the “take over a major party” strategy easier for conservative Republicans than for liberal (let alone leftist) Democrats.

4. Myles @86 argues that most Americans aren’t that liberal, so….

If the Democrats moved seriously leftward, you can be sure that either a) they won’t win presidential elections because of the centrist/elite flip, as in 1980; or b) if they persisted, they would cease being one of the two major parties, with a centrist party springing up with all the Google/Citigroup/whatever money to take their place.

(Incidentally, this seems like a problematic reading of the politics of 1980. Jimmy Carter in every meaningful way represented a rightward movement within the Democratic Party. And he received a vigorous primary challenge from his left, which he defeated. Yes, a lot of former Democratic voters abandoned Carter for Reagan in 1980, but it had little to do with Carter’s being too far to the left.)

On the other hand, LeeEsq @82 (riffing off another comment of Myles, ironically) notes (correctly, IMO) that “automatic Democrats” come from all over the ideological spectrum.

Obviously there’s some tension between these points of view: either the country is deeply ideologically centrist or centr-right (@86) or people have strong party loyalties that are fundamentally about things other than ideology (@82). At any rate Lee’s (and Myles’s) explanation for why the “left” cannot take over the Democratic Party seems to contradict Myles’s argument for why, if they did, they’d lose.

I tend to think that ideology plays some role in how people vote and why (some) people are members of their chosen party. But it’s also not the whole picture. The possibility for left success lies in this fact. Capture a major party and you’ve won half the game. Conservatives can govern far to the right of the American public for just this reason. In principle, we could just as easily govern this country to the left of the American public. At least in theory.

5. I say “at least in theory,” because in fact the left (even the center-left) appears to be in retreat around the world, as this post points out. So maybe our obsessive picking through of the minutiae of US party politics is totally missing the point.

Marc: I loathe the heighten-the-contradictions stance. But voting for Obama got us a bold charge into slashing the safety net advocated by Democrats. In a sensible world, the Simpson-Bowles pseudo-plan would be rejected as too crazily right-wing; instead it’s being pointed at a a sensible alternative on the left. War is up, insurance company power is going up, tax breaks for the richest are up, help for those of us down on the lower rungs is down, accountability for ruining the world economy is down. If you’ll point me at someone I could support in hopes of reversing this stuff, I’ll be happy to support them.

This is really depressing for someone in their late 40s. I foresee a much more miserable old age than my parents got, and I’d like to stop that, and I don’t for the life of me know how.

StevenAttewell @81,

Yes, all true. I was mainly trying to rebut the notion that modern-day liberals (American and otherwise, to some degree) are not descendants of classical liberalism (libertarians typically claim that mantle), and I left out a lot and was excessive in my argument.

Myles, politically I see myself as somewhere between squishy liberal and social democrat. I vary between whether economic/welfare issues or civil liberties/foreign relations/ending massive unnecessary military adventures is more important. I tend towards favoring a more left-leaning economy/welfare state, which might cost me my ACLU membership someday. I refer to myself as a liberal because most Americans have no idea what social democracy is and progressive seems a bit too impercise in describing what I believe.

Ben Alpers- I actually believe that the American center-left, that is liberals and progressives, can take over the Democratic Party in the same way that the Far Right took over the Republican Party between the Eisenhower Administration and Reagan’s election. What I believe is that for a variety of reasons, the American center-left is less willing to engage in this long and boring task to take over the Democratic Party than the Far Right was, although this seems to be changing recently. The American Far Left, however you define, does not have a chance of taking over a party.

Your observation regarding how center-left parties are moving rightwards all over the world is important. IMO, it has to do with the collapse of communism. Unfortunately, many seemed to have come to believe that since communism didn’t work as it was supposed to than extremist free market capitalism will work as it is supposed to. This makes no logical sense but it seems to be a popular belief.

I think its also important to point out that in most democratic countries in the post-war period, the Center Right has been in power more often than the Center Left with the exception of Sweden and the other Nordic countries. Other center right parties are bit more willing to embrace the welfare state than their American counter-parts but still.

Further-left ideas don’t get much support in the party because they don’t have much support in the electorate.

Hang on – that can’t be right

I thought this whole discussion was premissed on the idea that Obama is governing from a position which is substantially different, and to the right of the one he actually ran on. (That seems to be Greenwald’s view and it seems a correct claim at least on certain ‘rule of law’/’executive power’ issues.)

There were clearly enough votes for him to get elected on the platform he ran on. Because it was, in fact, the platform he ran on and got elected on. So there clearly are votes for further left positions than the ones that get implemented.

You can think that the Democrats have been compromised by corporate interests and you’d have a good case.

That would be a bit like accusing Britney Spears of selling out and becoming a mainstream commercial act.

#92: We agree there. I’ve always been one for political action, and the 2010 cycle was the first where I felt such action to be not so much hopeless (I’ve seen that before) as pointless. At least now the dread of the alternative is a suffiicient spur, but the gaping hole is still there.

I am, by the way, sympathetic to liberal complaints that the U.S. not necessarily as left-wing as the median voter. I simply don’t see what can be done about it; it’s baked into the system.

Regarding the demographics of left/right in America, I think Myles tends to exaggerate. While it’s true that the Harris poll shows liberals at about 18% of Americans compared to 35% conservative and 40% moderates, other polls show a different outlook when you change the question. Throwing other labels in to the mix shows you this: “34 percent of the country identifies as “conservative,” 29 percent as “moderate,” 15 percent as “liberal,” 16 percent as “progressive,” and 2 percent as “libertarian.” After moderates are asked which approach they lean toward, the overall ideological breakdown of the country divides into fairly neat left and right groupings, with 47 percent of Americans identifying as progressive or liberal and 48 percent as conservative or libertarian.”

Bruce Baugh:
I think you’re being more pessimistic than the evidence would support. Yes, it’s true that the media isn’t friendly to the left, and that many within the party leadership are as well. But the same was true (to varying degrees) of the Democratic Party in the 1920s or the 1950s, or the GOP in the 1960s-80s – political parties can and do shift their stances according to grassroots pressure.

JasonSL:
True. It’s much more accurate to say that classical liberalism split in the late 19th century, depending on whether you saw the rise of corporate capitalism as either a new threat to individual liberty or an extension of property rights. I really recommend Nancy Cohen’s book to anyone interested in this history, btw.

Steven Atwell: Honestly, I’d like to be wrong in my assessment, and am looking for reasons to decide I am, and in the meantime doing what I’d want to be doing if there’s more hope for change than I think. I’m being a Camus action hero, basically. :)

Except that it also seems to mean “I’m uncomfortable self-identifying as liberal, but more comfortable self-identifying as progressive.”

“There were clearly enough votes for him to get elected on the platform he ran on. Because it was, in fact, the platform he ran on and got elected on. So there clearly are votes for further left positions than the ones that get implemented.”

Yikes.

First, the president is not a prime minister. There are lots of things he can’t do if Congress is being stupid.

Second, ‘platform’ is a very broad concept. Not everything that Obama said at election time is the ‘platform’ and not all of even the platform represents things that marginal voters (votes in play) actually voted for. For example, I suspect that the number of otherwise Republican voters who voted for Obama based on his promise to close Guantanemo terrorist ‘prisons’ comes out to less than a dozen. And the number of otherwise Democratic voters who would NOT have voted for Obama if he had failed to make that promise probably comes out to less than a hundred. Therefore, when he broke that promise, he risked almost no votes.

That is probably the clearest example, but it applies to all sorts of other low valence marginal issues.

Your confusing two themes here: Big government and poverty.

Government spending has got out of control in most developed countries. There is no option but to rein this in.

Poverty among the working classes remains a big issue.

The challenge is how to cut government spending to reasonable levels while cutting poverty, or at least not letting it get any worse.

If only Glenn Greenwald were President. Then all the detainees would be tried in federal court, we’d have universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, better environmental regulations, more funding for education, revitalization of unions, equal marital rights, etc.

Obviously Obama doesn’t close Guantanimo simply because he doesn’t care. He committed to closing it, and spent valuable capital on the effort to do so, precisely because he never cared. If he REALLY cared, he would have spent everything on the effort.

The path to real victory would have been to make “fair treatment for accused 9/11 mastermind” the overarching issue, subjugating the economy, the budget, health care, and everything else to this discussion.

Really, I’m very surprised that more on the far-left haven’t done better politically.

Wait, wait, I’m sorry. The people on the far-left we’re talking about aren’t doing anything politically. They’re selling air-time and page hits. And I guess “is Obama kicking the left” makes for a wider audience than “why trying KSM by military commission is a mistake.”

But hey I’m one of those muddled moderates. Pay no attention.

If only Glenn Greenwald were President. Then all the detainees would be tried in federal court, we’d have universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, better environmental regulations, more funding for education, revitalization of unions, equal marital rights, etc.

I’m not sure Glenn is even for all that stuff — he so rarely talks about issues other than civil liberties, I honestly don’t know his stance on the economic issues. But in any case, in order to do all that he’d have to be President *and Congress*.

I’m not convinced that the metaphor of “spending political capital” relates usefully to anything that actually happens in real politics. Presidents aren’t issued a certain number of “make Congress pass whatever the hell I want” coupons at inauguration — obviously, if they were, it would make sense to talk about spending them, but they’re not. Obama keeps going back to negotiation because it’s the only tool he’s got. He can’t make Congresspeople vote for things they don’t want to vote for. The only executive check on Congress is the veto, which can only be used for inaction.

Now, sure, if you’re willing to hold the government and the economy hostage, you can turn inaction into a way of extorting action from someone else. We’re seeing that right now from the Tea Party and their “policy riders” — i.e. an agenda that could never pass through any legitimate political process. But Obama is too responsible to go that way (e.g. threatening to veto all budgets that don’t close Gitmo), and I can’t really regret that, all things considered. (Disclosure: one of the things I’m considering in that regard is that my father works for the government. So holding the budget hostage is *personally* damaging to my family.)

Henri Vieuxtemps: I’m not really sure if the “bully pulpit” is such a useful tool anymore for a President. In the past it might have been useful because people had fewer media options available to them and most media outlets felt compelled to broadcast/report on it because President speaking, obviously important. People tended to listen because of this. Currently, most media outlets do not fell compelled to broadcast President’s using the bully pulpit except the news/political ones and people can easily not pay attention to it. They have many more options available. This really reduces the utility of the bully pulpit. I actually think it makes it near useless.

If you have a hypothesis, is it too much to ask that it be falsifiable

I have to admit, I have no idea how you could falsify the idea that the President can’t dictate to members of Congress how they vote on things. Find a secret alternate Constitution written in invisible ink on the back of the regular one? Discover the mind-control-ray room underneath the Oval Office? Since the opposite camp refuses to disclose their theory (if they even have one) of how any President *can* make Congress do what he wants, it’s kind of hard to prove a negative.

Well, I guess there’s seeing him march his troops on the capitol like Sulla. That would falsify the idea that a President can’t dictate to Congress. It would also (if successful) turn him into an actual dictator. (If the President can dictate to Congress by any means, *especially* secret ones, then he pretty much is a secret dictator already: the supposedly independent third branch of the government is staffed, and sometimes stacked, by the first two. But in the real world, Supreme Court confirmations alone prove that Presidents can’t expect to get their way in Congress with anything approaching reliability.)

On the other hand, falsifying the idea that the President can make votes go the way he wants is easy. Every time a President’s agenda is publicly thwarted in Congress is a falsification. Or an occasion for special pleading that he must not really have wanted it… Even if you’re committed to the perfidy of Obama, do you think that, say, George W. Bush didn’t really want to privatize Social Security? If he did want that, how did Congress succeed in blocking him and overcoming his secret Presidential strongarming powers?

The fact that members of Congress choose how they vote is so integral a part of the U.S. Constitutional system of government, it seems bizarre for someone to ask for proof of it. The Constitution and history both show that legislation comes primarily from the legislative branch. The President can put an idea on the agenda, but a lot of the time Congress comes up with a plan that is noticeably different from his, or rejects his ideas outright. Even same-party Congresses do that sometimes, let alone the split Congress of today.

Personally I suspect that the Green Lantern theory of the Presidency derives from a sort of subconscious Green Lantern Theory of Everything — the “inspirational” but rather fuzzy-headed idea that you can do anything if you try hard enough, and therefore failure is *invariably* a sign of not trying hard enough — but it’s so absurd when dragged into the light that it would look like a strawman. But maybe if people rely on it without thinking too hard about it… I dunno.

Maybe we just need a new metaphor. If the fish aren’t biting, throwing your cast harder won’t help? You could try different bait, but they might not bite on that either. And since the legislation *is* the bait in this metaphor, trying different bait practically means negotiating, the very thing you’re attacking Obama for in the first place.

P.S. Bribery isn’t an alternative to negotiation, it’s a type of negotiation. I would not exactly be happy to see any president resort to *actual* bribery, but if you use bribery metaphorically to mean the kind of thing also referred to as “political horse-trading”, then Obama already does that, but it only gets you so far.

While I can see the public option being a tricky example, I think the case on Gitmo is more clear-cut, no? Obama announced a policy, tried to get through Congress, Congress voted in the negative.

“Fighting” is not a useful metaphor for the legislative process. Effort won’t make votes materialize out of thin air.

…on second thought, maybe it’s not so bad after all; the existence of judo and aikido and the rope-a-dope shows that trying harder isn’t necessarily a path to success in fighting either.

And, of course, in any oppositional contest, someone has to lose, regardless of how hard they’re trying. Boy, look at all th0se baseball players that spend 2/3 of their at-bats not trying to get on base. (Again: swinging harder: not necessarily helpful.) I can only imagine trying to actually be *on* a team with someone who interprets every loss as a betrayal.

when Obama made no move to fight for the public option and it was subsequently excluded from health care “reform”, we were told by the usual assortment of Administration apologists that “The votes just weren’t there.”

It was excluded BY CONGRESS. People saying the votes “just weren’t there” were saying they weren’t there IN CONGRESS. And you know what? In Congress, they were in fact not there! You can tell this, because when Congress passed the bill, the PO wasn’t in it.

You’re the one with the vague theory that the votes *could* have been there if only… Obama had “fought” (in some unspecified way that goes beyond talk, because God knows he did plenty of that) and made Congresspeople who voted against the PO vote in favor of it instead (by some unspecified mechanism). Not only is that not right, it’s not even wrong. There isn’t enough there to argue with.

But we already ruined at least one other thread this way without convincing each other of anything, so maybe we should drop it. Congress passed a bill with no public option, and Obama signed it rather than vetoing it. Those are facts. Might-have-beens are speculation.

It strikes me though that what Chris is proposing works to my advantage. So I’ll take Chris up on his offer: he’ll stop going on about how the president is powerless to take action in the face of Congressional opposition, and I’ll stop, well, whatever it is I’m supposed to be stopping.

Deal?

…and also, why was it the case that there weren’t enough votes? Do people in congress sincerely hate PO, or, perhaps, the sort of things like, for example, the fact that senator Lieberman’s wife is a paid lobbyist for the industry, had something to do with it? If so, then why not come out against corruption, and investigate senator Lieberman? And if, instead, he decides to go along with it, why should you believe anything he says at all?

It’s an observation that Obama did nothing to push the public option.

People are still talking about the public option? In 2011? James Fallows, in his brilliant take-down of the Economist magazine, said that “American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control.”

But this level of obsession would probably surprise even him.

Couldn’t be.

Aren’t you Canadian?

you could have went with Jefferson’s freezer-burned $90,000 in bribe money is just soooo 2005, and why are people still going on about that when what you’re talking about is people holding high office not taking bribes right now?

Well, the lazy and cliché answer to that is the quotation: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

As previously noted Myles, your uncited, unsourced opinions have little putative value

Mhm. Sure. And?

By the way, does a sentence end with a full stop in front of the parentheses if the parentheses contain a full sentence?

Many of the Blue Dog Democrats, especially in the Senate, seemed deathly afraid of supporting the public option because it looked too liberal and they thought it would hurt their re-election chances in their red states.

But this isn’t true at all, at least as far as I recall the polling at the time. Granted I don’t know the results of the polling from all of the red states, but I do know that several blue dogs were opposed to a public option even though clear majorities of their constituents supported it. Here’s a link to Nate Silver’s work on Blue Dog chicanery via Daily Kos:

The Blue Dogs have been fighting the good fight on behalf of the insurance companies, doing everything they can to stymie reform. When called to task for their anti-reform efforts, they hide behind their constituents, claiming they are simply representing the views of their constituents. We were curious — was there any truth to these claims? As we’ve seen, in some places (like Nebraska), it’s true, but in others, like in Jim Cooper’s Tennessee district, it’s not.

Maybe if you interpreted “being afraid to vote for the public option because it would hurt their reelection chances” as “being afraid of losing campaign contributions from major donors who have a stake in seeing the public option fail” you’d have a point. But I don’t see any other way for this to be true.

Also too those 100 plus bills pelosi passed that the senate and obama ignored belie the ideas that there are no votes for more liberal governance than obama has been practicing. Also further proof congress can be made to do stuff – i am sure getting cap and tradepast the finish line took some real work by pelosi.

Ben Alpers, yes maybe that is what he is saying. That said I think the opinions of politicians are often as maleable and unfixed as the public. A contribution from the world of ideas which stressed that successful government can be about audacity, radicalism and speed, dragging the debate to a new centre, far to the left of the last one, rather than constant triangulation/capitulation which the left (but never the post-seventies right) does, would be the way to go. Lots of the discussion even seems premissed on the idea that ‘public opinion’ is a pre-existing thing which exists independent of interventions by politicians.

No, Andrew, that is not how falsification works, though people who have had no formal training in the sciences or in propositional logic tend to think this is the case. In particular, it’ s quite possible for one theory to have more predictive power than another, only to be proven false later while the other is proven true.

A common mistake.

My undergraduate work was in both math and physics (and I was six hours short of collecting a computer science degree.) My graduate work was in math, where I did algebraic geometry with a generous side dish of topology (turns out that knowing your abstract and linear algebra is very important to both subjects, and there is a fair amount of interpenetration in any event.) I also teach in rotation courses dealing with just these topics, including courses that teach mathematical techniques for computer science majors – combinatorics, Boolean algebra and such – and undergraduate courses in statistics.

Regardless, and back to the topic at hand, you are aware, are you not, that what I said is exactly right? On both counts. Or are you? Do you disagree with what I said? If so, a little more directness would be appreciated. If you don’t disagree, then, well, your post doesn’t have much of a purpose that I can see.

Obviously Obama doesn’t close Guantanimo simply because he doesn’t care. He committed to closing it, and spent valuable capital on the effort to do so, precisely because he never cared. If he REALLY cared, he would have spent everything on the effort.

The path to real victory would have been to make “fair treatment for accused 9/11 mastermind” the overarching issue, subjugating the economy, the budget, health care, and everything else to this discussion.

I don’t have anything to add to the larger “kicking the left” argument, but it’s worth noting that closing Guanantamo and insisting on a civilian trial for KSM didn’t actually make sense once it became clear that we were going to have to accept military commissions and indefinite detention. Obama weakly fought over Guantanamo and KSM because he wanted a “win” and a “fulfilled” campaign promise, but the larger principle was dead by Obama’s May 21, 2009 speech.

That’s why you didn’t see a lot of the left screaming for KSM’s civilian trial–once we’ve taken it as given that some people have to be tried by a lower standard than a civilian court, well, why not KSM? If we’re still going to be detaining people without trial, why bother building a whole new facility to hold them in?

That said, I would agree that the left needs to do a better job arguing for why the rule of law is a good thing, rather than just bemoaning that we’re losing it.

When I saw SoV’s baffling remark about something or other not being how falsification works, and Andrew’s perfectly reasonable response, I nearly made a sarcastic remark about there probably being some flagrant burden of proof violation involved, but couldn’t be arsed.

I’m not sure whether to “sigh” or “chuckle” at the latest development, especially the continued riffing on the topic of non-maths-teachers’ inability to apply scientific method to the issue of What Happened when Obama Went to the Congress.

When I saw SoV’s baffling remark about something or other not being how falsification works, and Andrew’s perfectly reasonable response, I nearly made a sarcastic remark about there probably being some flagrant burden of proof violation involved, but couldn’t be arsed.

Do you mean to say you really do not know how falsification works? Just say so. I’ll tell you this much: if you apply modus ponens/tollens to a p implies q statement, there had better a be a negation of somewhere in the statement of disproof. This is indeed elementary.

Let me repost a previous question I asked to show you how this is done:

Your claim is of the former type, in that you say that the proponents of hypothesis X (e.g. the President supported a public option, but the votes were not there) are not being reasonable in accepting contrary evidence; the hypothesis itself is, of course, perfectly amenable to empirical verification.

You claim this hypothesis is “of course, perfectly amenable to empirical verification.” I’ve already asked you once, specifically, how you would do this then. You haven’t replied yet, which I’ll assume is an oversight. But an explanation of how you would verify the proposition that “the votes just weren’t there” seems to be called for. I’m always willing to learn new things :-)

I’ve already explained this. In post 144, as a matter of fact. You wrote:

Scent of Violets: Your argument is not that Chris is putting forth a non-falisifiable hypothesis, but that he refuses to accept evidence that should be seen as contrary to it. Your claim is with respect to the proponents of a particular hypothesis, and not with respect to the hypothesis itself.

I then replied (in 144):

No, Andrew, that is not how falsification works . . . In particular, it’ s quite possible for one theory to have more predictive power than another, only to be proven false later while the other is proven true.

History is rife with examples, for example, epicycles at one point made better predictions than a theory that modeled planetary motions as ellipses. It was wrong of course. But that wasn’t apparent then, and the fact that the theory of epicycles made better predictions didn’t really have much to do with whether or not it was ultimately correct. It’s even possible for both theories to be true. Or false. Newton thought that light was basically corpuscular in nature, and this seemed to be in good accord with observation. Huygen’s notion that light was a wave phenomenon both begged the question of what was waving and didn’t seem to be all that well supported by the experiments of the day. Later on, of course, both views turned out to be correct.

Does that clear up your confusion? The ability to make predictions is related to falsification, but they are not equivalent.

Now would you please answer my question about how “the hypothesis itself is, of course, perfectly amenable to empirical verification.“? Given the “of course”, and “perfectly amenable”, I would think that you should have answered this the first time I asked. This is the third time, btw.

Scent: where did I state anything that would contradict your comments about predictiveness as merely one of several explanatory virtues? What confuses me is not the substantive point about predictiveness – of course we agree on it – but why you seemed think that I ever thought differently. Your comment at 144 is almost a non sequiter in that I cannot tell how your point contradicts anything I’ve said.

Andrew, when people’s writing suddenly gets hard to understand, which is seems to be doing in this case, my instincts as a teacher is that the person is trying to pull a fast one. Want me to quote where you thought otherwise? Again?

Scent of Violets: Your argument is not that Chris is putting forth a non-falisifiable hypothesis, but that he refuses to accept evidence that should be seen as contrary to it. Your claim is with respect to the proponents of a particular hypothesis, and not with respect to the hypothesis itself.

I repeat, for the fourth or fifth time: that’s not how falsifiability works, and no I am not saying he is refusing to accept evidence that should be seen as contrary to it. You were – and are – wrong on both points.

I can’t really be any clearer than that, except to note that your reaction leads me to believe that I’m being very clear.

Nor was your criticism of Chris’s theory premised on some failing of virtue other than predictive power, such as parsimony. In 141 for example, you wrote quite eloquently that the theory gives the comforting illusion of explanatory power without actually delivering anything in the way of predictions.

You’re contradicting yourself. Either I’m – according to you – really taking issue with the sort of evidence he should find acceptable (that is, his theory really is falsifiable), or I’m taking issue with the fact that it’s not falsifiable (which was my original claim.) You can’t have it both ways.

In any event, I’m not going to waste any more time on explanations that I think you already understand. Should you wish to continue this conversation, you will need to put some effort into convincing me that your behaviour is in good faith. Don’t try to fake outrage, or retreat any further into the style of writing you have resorted to. Do be humble, and try very, very hard to convince me that you are genuinely looking for knowledge as opposed to taking a certain tack. Starting with admitting that you are contradicting yourself in the bit I quoted. There is no room for shifting on this point, and anything other than a frank or forthright admission will confirm my suspicions.

If you’re genuinely on the up and up, you’ll understand why I regard your behaviour as suspicious. If you’re not, well, it’s nothing I haven’t seen from a thousand different students already.

Andrew, this is non-negotiable: you either admit that you were contradicting yourself in the parts I quoted – possibly unintentionally, but nevertheless contradicting yourself – or this conversation is at an end. I’m sorry, but your behaviour leads me to believe that you’re not acting in good faith. I’m not going to repeat my request again. After that, you can then decide whether or not you’re accusing me of making the argument that Chris refuses to be convinced by reasonable evidence, or you can accuse me of making the argument that what people like Chris are promoting is an unfalsifiable proposition. I’d go with the latter, since that is what I’ve been saying for many, many posts now.

Btw, if you don’t include that admission – a heartfelt sincere admission – that you were contradicting yourself, I won’t be bothered to reply. To my mind you’ll be just another student who thinks that if only they can wear me down by refusing to go away, I’ll go ahead and give them that extra four points even though I’ve already explained six times why they didn’t get them the first time around. So it’s your call now. I’m sorry you think it is somehow to your advantage to conduct yourself in this fashion; I’m guessing that perhaps you’re in some sort of legal profession, as opposed to a scientific one.

Btw, if you don’t include that admission – a heartfelt sincere admission – that you were contradicting yourself, I won’t be bothered to reply.

Prima donna, or prima donna assoluta?

I am thinking the latter. There’s a species of people who go the Internet to demand “heartfelt [sic] sincere admission,” but it’s not the normal one.

Btw, if you don’t include that admission – a heartfelt sincere admission – that you were contradicting yourself, I won’t be bothered to reply.

Prima donna, or prima donna assoluta?

I am thinking the latter. There’s a species of people who go the Internet to demand “heartfelt [sic] sincere admission,” but it’s not the normal one.

Uh, Myles? About the libeling thing . . . were you ever going to back that up, or were you going to man up and apologize ;-)

There’s a reason why I’ve decided that conversations shouldn’t progress past a certain point. And those reasons stem from the many, many, encounters I’ve had with people of your sort. Yeah, people like you really do wish the past would just go away and everything gets reset on the next go-round with no ground lost. That’s to your advantage. It is not, however, to mine :-(

But Scent (though it isn’t his blog and notably, he is the only one here who has pulled rank by claiming his academic position is higher than that of anyone else in the discussion)

Uh, excuse me? Where did I do this? I make no secret of my background, but I don’t tend to use it as a trump unless someone else is trying to play their credentials as some sort of high card.

I do, however, respect immensley the scientific method and style of inquiry. It beats everything else humans have to ascertain truth or falsity in the world (Except in the extremely specialized world of mathematics where deduction trumps all and the truth or falsity of various propositions once ascertained, are absolute. You can’t do that sort of thing in the real world.)

Anyway, please be good enough to point out where I have resorted to some sort of credentialism here. Looking back over the thread, I just don’t see it.

And yet Scent isn’t obviously in possession with the kind of high position in such a hierarchy that would justify his behavior (even taking into account his apparent claim that only Andrew’s being a lawyer, as well as his operating in the corporate, business world, could explain his denying Scent such a high rank).

Well no, it’s not about me at all. It’s about standards of proof. Let’s go back to something Chris said:

It was excluded BY CONGRESS. People saying the votes “just weren’t there” were saying they weren’t there IN CONGRESS. And you know what? In Congress, they were in fact not there! You can tell this, because when Congress passed the bill, the PO wasn’t in it.

If you formalize this, what you get is something like p implies q, q, so p. This is false. It’s also a very natural, almost instinctive way to reason for a lot of – most – people, and usually can only be knocked out of them by a good grounding in how science works.

Let me give another example: In one iteration of “conservatives are lock out of academia because liberals are mean”, one person responded to my challenge to produce a theory that was rejected because it was conservative rather than because it was wrong or not proven by citing the “Black Culture” theory of underperformance. That is, African-Americans don’t tend to do well in school because if they do, they are mocked by their peers, accused of “acting White”, and ultimately shunned to some degree or another.

Where’s your proof, sez I, and he responds by citing a so-called “authoritative” study that purported to show that yes, black males who performed well in college tended to have fewer friends than those who didn’t.

Do you see the problem with that sort of reasoning? It implicitly assumes that the only reason a young black male doing well in college would have fewer friends than otherwise would be if he were somehow subject to “shunning”. There could be other reasons (I won’t go into this studies other defects, such as it’s lack of examination of young white males who were doing well in college and the relative number of friends they had.) Iow, the formal mistake was in thinking that if p implies q, then q implies p. Not true. If you’re looking at the q side of things, then what you’re looking for is proof or disproof of not-q implies not-p; in this particular study, they would have had to have looked at subjects who had more friends (relatively speaking), and then examine how well that group was doing academically.

As I said, a common mistake.

Back to Chris. Look at what I quoted above, and in particular, the part I bolded. Do you think this is an example of valid reasoning? Why or why not?

What is this, an attempt to get me to say But nobody would make the mistake of thinking that “p is correlated with q” implies both “p implies probably q” and “q implies probably p”–much less that the same statement implies “there is a metaphysical something-or-other (maybe a Platonic form) that causes the correlation of p and q”–because stats professors are so really really terrific?

Scent: You are claiming that you are a superior arbiter of logical consistency, etc., than Andrew and chris and others who have disagreed with you. Andrew, in particular, has invited you to explain your criteria, in order to see why you two disagree. You asserted that you don’t have to (whereas he has to meet every one of your specific challenges). How are you not pulling rank? If you are claiming that we are all equal arbiters of logical consistency, how do you account for the disagreement? (If it matters, I count three votes against you to your one in favor.)

Chris is right. It’s not circular because it’s definitional. There is this social institution called congress in which votes cause bill passage. Chris is also right on the larger point even if he can’t persuade you that you’re wrong. No one can be expected to have a full theory at his fingertips that allows him to condemn every objection, and there’s no reason your opinion should trump his.

If you have the time to seriously answer this kind of challenge whenever it comes over your transom, the pace of your work must be fairly slow. Or else the division of labor at your workplace must be breathtakingly meticulous.

Scent: Perhaps you’re not aware of the tension between your assertions that x is unfalsifiable, and your arguments which have been directed solely at showing that various persons were being unreasonable in rejecting evidence?

Your own statement at 121 is a beautiful illustration: If you have a hypothesis, is it too much to ask that it be falsifiable (actually, it’s been pointed out that this particular storyline has been falsified many times over, but, well, you know they say about investments)?

Here you manage to assert that hypothesis x is unfalsifiable, and then parenthetically note that it has been falsified. When I point out this tension, I’m hardly contradicting myself.

I try to read charitably, and to focus disagreements so that they’re fruitful. Your disagreement with Chris really has nothing to do with falsification, and continuing on that line won’t persuade anyone.

I also wonder whether you realize that you imply at times that others lack training in logic, or are making elementary mistakes and could use more education? Things like this are an impediment to the discussion, since you’re not only inserting personal insults, but you’re doing so on points that require little more than Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia and a modicum of intelligence to grasp. Everyone does make mistakes, of course, and it’s helpful to point them out; your speculation as to the causes of mistakes you think you see is less helpful.

Chris is right. It’s not circular because it’s definitional. There is this social institution called congress in which votes cause bill passage. Chris is also right on the larger point even if he can’t persuade you that you’re wrong. No one can be expected to have a full theory at his fingertips that allows him to condemn every objection, and there’s no reason your opinion should trump his.

So Chris is right because he’s stating a definition, not a theory, and others aren’t allowed to put their own up or challenge his, if I’ve got that all right.

But it’s nice to know that if Chris meant this bit of exposition to be a theory, then his argument would be circular :-)

In any event, this interesting notion of definition instead of theory goes back to my initial obtrusion, namely that it has no predictive power. Measure fails and Obama made no effort to push it? Measure succeeds and Obama went to considerable lengths to twist arms? Measure (improbably) succeeds when Obama failed to push it, or fails after he went to great lengths to get it through Congress?

Well, no matter which type of the four possible outcomes actually occurs, the explanation is always the same, and we can’t make any predictions, only Monday-morning post-dictions.

So no matter what you choose to call this line of thinking, it’s unfalsifiable – and more to the point, worthless in terms of explanatory power.

If you have the time to seriously answer this kind of challenge whenever it comes over your transom, the pace of your work must be fairly slow. Or else the division of labor at your workplace must be breathtakingly meticulous.

Well, it is the weekend and I’m all caught up on my grading . . . but I’m guessing that’s not an acceptable excuse :-)

The reason I asked about your qualifications is that you make such a big deal out of them and you’re so obviously terrible at arguments.

Uh-huh. Right. I suppose you can quote anywhere on this thread where I’ve made a big deal out of my qualifications, right? Let’s see what you got. And you know, this seems to be a problem of late, but you didn’t answer my question: do you in fact disagree with what I said?

I’m guessing that the answer to all of the above is “no”. At which point you’re being rude and snide to no purpose. You know, the sort of thing that your accusing me of, and which you say is bad. Maybe I’m just not up on the rules ;-)

Dude, give up. Everyone’s laughing at you.

How do you get through daily life without getting all sniffy over something or another? Sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff. It’s like you’re proud of it.

Sniff.

It was excluded BY CONGRESS. People saying the votes “just weren’t there” were saying they weren’t there IN CONGRESS. And you know what? In Congress, they were in fact not there! You can tell this, because when Congress passed the bill, the PO wasn’t in it.

For the record, the last sentence of this was a deliberate simplification. I was trying to point out the crux of the disagreement by cutting through all the coulda shoulda woulda and getting back to the objectively verifiable facts: the bill actually passed by the actual Congress actually didn’t include the public option.

Now, of course, it is *in principle* quite simple to falsify “the votes just weren’t there”: by proving that the votes were in fact there. Statements from a sufficient number of congresspeople (under circumstances that make it believable they weren’t lying) that they would have voted for the PO/voted for cloture on a bill with a PO if (condition), where the conditions are all possible and not mutually contradictory, would prove that there was some set of circumstances under which the PO could have passed.

It seems to me that you have not reached this standard of evidence, and are making no attempt to do so. The House actually did vote for the PO, so that whole side is done for you — now you just have to find the votes in the Senate, i.e., do Harry Reid’s job better than Harry Reid did it. I’m not saying that’s impossible, but it’s something that needs to be *done* for your argument to advance, not just casually waved in its direction with the assumption that it could be done if you wanted to (or if Obama wanted t0).

If you do that, and also a sufficient number of the conditions are things within Obama’s power to grant/arrange, then you would have proved that some course of action by Obama could have secured the passage of the PO. If you prove that *and* that Obama *knew* that, then you would have proved that Obama chose not to arrange the passage of the PO. (If a deal was possible but Obama missed it, then he blundered, which is a criticism, but a lesser one than the betrayal narrative you’ve been advancing so far.) But the first step is showing that passage was possible at all.

Your problem is that you don’t have the evidence that would *actually falsify* “the votes weren’t there”, but you’re determined to believe it’s false anyway, so you have to make vague assertions about falsifiability and chuckle over the internet. ISTM that if you know what kind of evidence would falsify a statement *and you don’t have that evidence* you ought to give some thought to the possibility that you don’t have the evidence to falsify it because it isn’t false.

On the other hand, as the above discussion makes clear, to falsify the idea that the votes could have been gotten in some unspecified way, you’d need credible statements from a sufficient number of congresspeople that they would never have voted for the PO under any circumstances whatsoever. (In other words, you’re asking me to prove a negative 41 times over.) For most Republicans this is pretty much a given, but there are some that can be argued over, not to mention Lieberman and some moderate Democrats.

With neither side being able to definitely falsify the other, that means the evidence available is not enough to determine whether some form of persuasion could have brought enough senators on board or not. And it’s hard to come up with new evidence about counterfactual events that might have taken place in the last Congress but didn’t. That’s why I suggested about 60 comments ago that further continuation might be futile.

P.S. I would also point out that the kind of horse-trading Henri is talking about works best on low-visibility issues and votes. HCR was just the opposite. It would be hard for anyone to give anything of value equivalent to a flip-flop on HCR precisely because the issue was so huge and publicly scrutinized. But if you think you have proof that enough Senators were gettable, go ahead and show it.

a filibuster proof majority in the senate

This was only ever there if you accepted Nelson and Lieberman (for example) as part of the majority. (And before Ted Kennedy died.) But then you can’t pass things they don’t agree to stand with you on. Like the public option.

I think it’s a failure of the U.S. Senate. The House bill was much better, but the Senate overrepresents residents of small and rural states (which lean more conservative) and then, effectively, imposes a supermajority requirement on top of that. There’s no doubt in my mind that that’s a major barrier to any progressive agenda and, while the last Congress was better than average, it’s not the sort of Senate that you can reasonably expect to see major progressive action out of. But I see little point in blaming Obama or even Reid for the Senate’s status as stumbling block.

Show me a Senate with 60 *genuinely progressive* Senators in it — progressive independents are OK, but not difference-splitters or third-wayers regardless of nominal party affiliation — and *then* I’ll expect major progressive legislation to pass without a hitch. But that’s not what we had, and equivocation that includes difference-splitters in the “filibuster-proof majority” but then refuses to accept any difference-splitting in the policy that passes is dumb. (Or dishonest, if it’s done on purpose.)

And it’s not going to be the Senate we have any time soon, because lots of Americans actually believe the Republican or even Tea Party lines and vote accordingly. That’s the ball we (for some vague meaning of “we”) shouldn’t take our eye off. Any individual politician, even the President, is a sideshow compared to moving the electorate.

This was only ever there if you accepted Nelson and Lieberman (for example) as part of the majority.

Acknowledging the fatalism here, the perception is that horse-trading via the White House was not as intense as it could have been. Senators can be persuaded just like congressmen, and you see these changes of heart on a pretty regular basis depending on what gets built in an electoral district. So sure, the Senate sucks, but recent budget negotiations don’t help the hindsight of people who felt ripped off.

Your problem is that you don’t have the evidence that would actually falsify “the votes weren’t there”, but you’re determined to believe it’s false anyway, so you have to make vague assertions about falsifiability and chuckle over the internet.

Sigh. No Chris. I’m not “determined to believe it’s false anyway.” But rather than have yet another go ’round, how about this: Why don’t you quote me anywhere where I’ve ever said the votes were there? If you can’t do that, then you admit the burden of proof is on you. If you can, I’ll cheerfully admit that I have a theory myself that I need to prove.

Deal?

Why should House Democrats have to write a letter like this?

The argument over what to do about (with, for, or against) the Democratic Party is one I have every month (at my monthly discussion tired). I occasionally get actual Green Party members or trotskyists to show up. I’m glad to see an educated discussion on this here, many interesting points have been made.

As for me, I’d pretty much go with what Chris is saying, though confessing that SoV has a point. Though perhaps a rather small point. The observation reduces to Obama doing little about public option. We have zero information about *why* he did so little.

WRT Obama’s “unacceptible” behavior called out by SoV, it’s very hard to judge that without knowing more about what this *deal* was. To what degree, if any, did Obama’s actions thwart the actions of others who may have still been working on Public Option. Perhaps those others could have been successful, or more to the point their lack of success had little to do with Obama’s dealmaking. In many conceivable circumstances, it may have been better for Obama not to say anything about his dealmaking, if perhaps an even better deal could be obtained later. I don’t think that any of the work done for Public Option was lost or wasted either, considering the basic problem of informing the electorate. I think if Obama had come out and announced his deal, it would be (1) a great and shining day for open government (almost unimaginable), and (2) of no benefit whatsoever to people still working on Public Option, except possibly by openly blackmailing the President over his flip flop.

Anyway, legislation moving the ball forwards (barely) for the first time in 75 years is worth something, IMO. Though many other leftists I know consider it a step backwards.

I was just thinking that some of the Green Party or ISO leftists I know (the kind that refuse to say anything positive about Democrats or The Democratic Party, and instead say much negative, both parties are the same, etc) have a kind of personal aversion to social democratic policies of a share-the-wealth nature, but have little such aversion to regulation or things like that. In a way, they seem too conservative (fiscally conservative particularly) to me.

“So why do I have to prove anything?”

You never do, SoV, that is why bringing up burden of proof seems like such a winning argument to you so often.

Invoking the magic words ‘scientific method’ does not prove you are using it. If you don’t understand that the President can’t force a vote in Congress, or that he can’t make Congressmen vote the way he wants, saying “scientific method” doesn’t mean you are actually employing it. If you DO understand that, and are just making rhetorical garbage, so be it. If you DO understand that and would like to make some actual point, you’ve had plenty of chances to do so, and might want to consider that a bunch of very educated people seem to regularly be incapable of understanding what you are trying to do (presuming of course that it isn’t just trolling).

You started the mess with the completely jerk-like 121, followed immediately by your incredibly regular burden of proof gambit. This led to your typical disclaiming that you have any particular burden of proof for your statements, another regular feature of your ‘rhetoric’. See also your crap on falsification later. This thread is a cornucopia of your regularly employed rhetorical games.

If you want to make a point, just freaking make the point. Don’t pretend that you are conducting someone’s PhD oral examination.

It is a FACT that the president does not have direct power over Congress. He is not the parlimentarian in charge, he does not have a vote, he cannot kick someone out of the party if they vote against his wishes. He only has a veto, which is mentioned by the people you are arguing with.

You *SEEM* to want to say that the President actually does have notable power over Congress. That of course would be a hypothesis worth looking at, but you can’t do that, because you don’t accept the burden of proof. So instead you attack the fact that president does not have direct power over Congress as if it was some sort of ridiculous hypothesis.

You take what ought to be YOUR burden of proof (that while factually the President doesn’t have direct power over Congress, he has enough indirect power that it is worth talking about in changing the outcomes under discussion) and invert it into everyone else’s burden of proof if they don’t agree with you.

I actually hate, myself, several things about the way Scent argues–and I think he’s actually probably too set in his ways to benefit from an elaboration (which is OT here anyway)–but in his place I might not understand Sebastian’s point @ 198. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to not understand the point. What is “rhetorical garbage”? And so on. Somewhere back in the CT archives, there is something by John Holbo on Stanley Fish’s contention that rational debate is just who wins, so then scientific method is more or less Darwinian. And it’s fine, given some basic groundrules, which however don’t really hold here (given among other things diversity).

(I’m trying not to say something crude but I don’t think it’s an accident that only men end up in the discussion at this point.)

This has become somewhat puzzling to me.

The House actually did pass a reform bill, barely, with a public option. The Senate, barely, passed a reform bill without a public option. In the Senate, the Republicans were one vote short of blocking the legislation.

The President opted to sign the reconciled bill, which has no public option.

Given the margin of victory in the Senate, and the President’s prior support of a public option, it seems extremely plausible to me that the President simply decided that some reform was better than no reform.

The thesis that the President “gave away” the public option for nothing seems absolutely without support.