Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Bi-Partisan Repudiation of the Left

Dan Balz pens an electoral analysis titled GOP-Leaning Majority Seen Fading in U.S. It’s yet another variation on the ‘Republicans are dying’ theme and frankly I think it’s all a bit premature, since a single charismatic figure - with a facility for glossing over the GOP’s weakness on ideas and issues - can ignite a spark with the electorate and recapture momentum for the party out of power.

But if GOP strategist Mike Murphy is right that we’re approaching a Republican “ice age,” then shouldn’t the Obama administration and congressional Democrats move solidly and unapologetically to the left and seize the chance to enact progressive policies across the board?

Granted, right-leaning analysts and many Democrats think Obama is doing exactly that - and more. Yet if we’re to believe progressive stalwarts, the new administration is breaking promises, violating progressive principles, and reaffirming Bush’s excesses in a number of crucial areas, from gay rights to civil liberties to transparency and state secrets. And that’s before we see how the health care debate unfolds.

The problem may be the premise that the administration and Democratic leaders feel a compunction to honor progressive ideals. Maybe they don’t. If so, the rationale is likely the unshakable Beltway belief that’s it’s politically safer to hew to the elusive ‘middle’ - wherever that is.  That will prove to be a long-term miscalculation.

Victory has a thousand fathers and everyone wants credit for electing Obama, but in the end, it was the fierce progressive activism during the Bush years that led to the Democratic resurgence. I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting defiance of the netroots during the Bush years. Most importantly, progressive policies are good policies, both morally and politically (the latter is something lost on many Democrats strategists) and no leader should ever be ashamed of seeking maximum justice, fairness, and opportunity, the cornerstones of progressivism.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Over the past decade, there’s been a pathological need by Democratic leaders to seek the approval of the likes of David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan while secretly getting satisfaction out of angering progressive activists, due primarily to the stubborn conviction that it makes them more electable. Correspondingly, many traditional media figures identify with Obama and what they see as ’pragmatic’, ‘reasonable’ Democrats. They remain more intimidated by Drudge than by Huffington or Hamsher, still happier to mock the “far left” than the right. The unintended consequence of all this is the acquiescing by the media and Democrats to the rightwing message machine’s repudiation of liberals. Feeling unfettered and unencumbered, liberal-bashers like Limbaugh, O’Reilly and others spew their hate, which in turn fuels rightwing extremism.

On June 12th, Salon’s Joan Walsh appeared on the O’Reilly Factor to discuss George Tiller’s murder. It was a volcanic encounter, with O’Reilly at one point yelling “stop talking.” O’Reilly’s worst insult is to accuse Joan of being part of the “far left,” a term he spits out with the kind of disdain you’d reserve for a serial killer.

Many people blame talk show hosts like O’Reilly for inciting anger and hatred. I couldn’t agree more. But those who place all the blame for stoking rightwing extremism on the conservative message machine are missing a huge piece of the puzzle, namely, the role of the traditional media and Democratic leaders in the demonization of the left.

Paul Krugman writes about the Big Hate:

Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Much as I admire Krugman, if I’m reading him correctly, he’s painting a woefully incomplete picture. In fact, if you look back at the Bush and Clinton years, rightwing hate found its biggest platform on major media outlets, who gladly provided national soapboxes to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and others, while elected Democrats said or did precious little about it and ran away from the ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ mantle like the plague.

Here’s what I wrote three summers ago after a particularly despicable round of Ann Coulter appearances (the quotes are truncated):

NBC, a major U.S. media outlet, has knowingly given a public forum to a woman who slandered 9/11 widows and who is now on the record identifying a U.S. Congressman, a Marine, as an ideal target for murder. Anybody who watched Ann Coulter’s June 14th appearance on the Tonight Show had to realize that it was a watershed moment in the war between the establishment media and the progressive netroots. It was also a signal to Democrats that liberal ideology can be denigrated with impunity.

Never mind that Jay Leno and George Carlin sat like trembling lambs while Coulter spewed gutter-level invective at millions of Americans - we’ve already seen the same obsequiousness from Larry King, Matt Lauer (who ended his faux-debate with Coulter by saying “always fun to have you”) and others. The larger issue here is that despite an uproar from the progressive netroots, NBC saw fit to give Coulter a platform to continue her liberal-scapegoating and to slander women who lost their husbands on 9/11. (For the record, many rightwing bloggers denounced Coulter and several Democrats attacked her, but their focus was the substance of Coulter’s words, not a criticism of the media outlets who continue to provide her a national forum.)

It’s hard to deny that Coulter’s words border on incitement. She treats a substantial segment of the population as sub-human, as creatures deserving of public scorn and worse (She said Jesus would say that “we are called upon to do battle” on liberalism). Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their ilk have made an industry out of liberal-bashing. Coulter fits in perfectly with those hate-traffickers. And contrary to the false Michael Moore comparisons made by Leno and others, there is no progressive counterpart to these people on the national stage.

The issue here is not the damage done to America’s public discourse - we already know that liberals have become the equivalent of terrorists in the minds of millions of Americans. Nor is the issue the media’s hunger for ratings (what’s next, snuff films?) The issue is the establishment media’s symbiotic relationship with these rightwing blatherers. The propagation of anti-left and pro-right narratives by the establishment media is more insidious - and thus more dangerous - than the cowardly bleating of people like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill Bennett, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh. When Coulter is invited to spout her putrescence on Larry King Live, the legitimacy granted to her is CNN’s fault, not Coulter’s. After all, there’s no shortage of desperate attention seekers willing to say and do outlandish things to get noticed. The question is, why does CNN grant an open forum to this particular whack-job and not others?

Although Democrats have since regained power and the Internet has diminished the media’s agenda-setting power, the point of my 2006 post remains: year after year, the traditional media and political establishment, including Democrats, allowed a parade of liberal-bashers to poison the national dialogue and to demonize a large segment of the population. The results are manifested today. And it continues in the media: here’s global warming denier John Stossel’s recent puff piece on Glenn Beck for ABC. It also continues with the arms length treatment of progressives by the White House and Democratic leaders.

Speaking to Alternet, Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, gets to the heart of the issue:

Joshua Holland: There is a lot of ugly discourse in this country, and there always has been. What makes eliminationist rhetoric different from the kind of run-of-the-mill nasty stuff that we see on all sides of the political spectrum?

David Neiwert: Right—there is a lot of hateful rhetoric that floats around on both sides. What’s unique about eliminationist rhetoric is that it talks about eliminating whole blocs of people from the body politic, whereas most of the hateful rhetoric, in the case of people on the left, is directed at an individual—George Bush or Dick Cheney and various characters on the right. That’s one of the key differences—when right-wing people talk hatefully, it often is directed at entire groups of people: Latinos, African Americans, gays and lesbians or liberals.

JH: People they deem to be inferior. 

DN: Deemed inferior, or not even human. That is a critical aspect of eliminationist rhetoric. It often depicts the opposition as subhuman—comparing them with vermin, diseases or carriers of diseases.

JH: Now, there tends to be a counternarrative on the right. You talk in the book about Michelle Malkin and her thesis about deranged liberals.

DN: “Unhinged” is her word.

JH: Right, unhinged liberals. The argument is that their discourse is just as bad or dangerous, only it comes from a different ideological perspective. How would you respond to that?

DN: Well, the main difference is that when it happens on the left, it tends to be minor characters—fringe actors—not people in leadership positions. People on the left in leadership positions tend to try to be pretty responsible in their rhetoric, mainly because they know they will be viciously attacked if they don’t. On the right, it’s pandemic for people in leadership—leading pundits, leading politicians, leading religious figures—all kinds of folks are doing this. It ranges from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter—who all claim audiences of millions of people—as opposed to the kind of people that Malkin cites who are fringe commentators on blog sites.

JH: So she’s cherry-picking comments on blog posts and attributing them to the authors of the blogs.

DN: That is correct.

The takeaway is this: progressives have rightfully opposed the fear-mongering of rightwing hate peddlers and the wholesale assault on liberalism, but the blame for enabling rightwing extremism lies not just with Republicans and conservatives, it’s with those who offered a platform – or remained silent – while a toxic brew of liberal-bashing was fed to the American public. People who should have been rejected as extremists were embraced and empowered.  Nor has the problem abated, notwithstanding a Democratic presidency. If anything, the danger is that a continuing cold shoulder to the progressive community makes the problem more severe.

Reporters and pundits who chuckle at hate radio hosts or regurgitate their words, and Democrats who fail to mount a vigorous defense of progressive ideology – or worse, happily shun the left – should consider the ramifications.

I took heat for disagreeing with the ‘elevate Limbaugh’ strategy orchestrated by senior Democratic strategists and assisted by the White House. But I feel more strongly than ever that haters like Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly should be marginalized, not legitimized and elevated. After all, words can have deadly consequences. Anyone who thinks it’s helpful to mock the “far left” – especially when that term is used overbroadly to describe a wide swath of dedicated progressive activists - is ignoring the results of the unmitigated assault on liberals and liberalism, a campaign of hate that has calcified the kind of blind hatred that ultimately leads to violence.

Topics: obama, oreilly, left, netroots, progressive, democrats