[Marxism] Obama should act like he won

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Obama Should Act Like He Won
By THOMAS FRANK

As we anxiously await the debut of the Obama administration, we hear 
more and more about the incoming president's "post-partisan" instincts. 
He has filled his cabinet with relics of the centrist Clinton years. He 
has engaged the evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at 
his inauguration. And according to Politico, he wants 80 Senate votes 
for his stimulus plan -- a goal that would mean winning a majority among 
Republicans as well as Democrats.

Maybe these will turn out to be wise moves. Maybe they won't.

Audacity they ain't, though. There is no branch of American political 
expression more trite, more smug, more hollow than centrism.

After all, as Mark Leibovich pointed out in Sunday's New York Times, 
transcending faction has been the filler-talk of inaugural addresses 
going back at least to Zachary Taylor's in 1849. When you hear it today 
-- bemoaning as it always does "the extremes of both parties" or "the 
divisive politics of the past" -- it is virtually a foolproof indicator 
that you are in the presence of a well-funded, much-televised Beltway hack.

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more 
specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at 
the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely 
to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says 
it wants.

And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort 
of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are "New Democrats," "Radical 
Centrists," clear-eyed believers in a "Third Way." The red-hot tepids, 
we might call them -- the jellybeans of steel.

The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I 
think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic 
mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly 
on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a 
way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is 
also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.

Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so 
much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that 
he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond 
question what is to be done.

Here, for example, is centrist Washington Post columnist Sebastian 
Mallaby, writing last October on the debate then raging over the role of 
deregulation in precipitating the financial crisis: "So blaming 
deregulation for the financial mess is misguided. But it is dangerous, 
too, because one of the big challenges for the next president will be to 
defend markets against the inevitable backlash that follows this crisis."

Got that? Criticizing deregulation is not merely wrong but "dangerous," 
virtually impermissible, since it problematizes the politics that 
everyone knows president 44 will ultimately embrace.

As this should remind us, the real-world function of Beltway centrism 
has not been to wage high-minded war against "both extremes" but to 
fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of 
liberalism. Centrism's institutional triumphs have been won mainly if 
not entirely within the Democratic Party. Its greatest exponent, 
President Bill Clinton, persistently used his own movement as a foil in 
his great game of triangulation.

And centrism's achievements? Well, there's Nafta, which proved Democrats 
could stand up to labor. There's the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. 
There's the Iraq war resolution, approved by numerous Democrats in brave 
defiance of their party's left. Triumphs all.

Histories of conservatism's rise, on the other hand, often emphasize 
that movement's adherence to principle regardless of changing public 
attitudes. Conservatives pressed laissez-faire through good times and 
bad, soldiering on even in years when suggesting that America was a 
"center-right nation" would have made one an instant laughingstock.

And what happens when a strong-minded movement encounters a politician 
who acts as though the truth always lies halfway between his own 
followers and the other side? The dolorous annals of Clinton suggest an 
answer, in particular the chapters on Government Shutdown and Impeachment.

That's why it is so obviously preferable to be part of the movement that 
doesn't compromise easily than to depend on the one that has developed a 
cult of the almighty center. Even a conservative as ham-handed as former 
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay seems to understand this.

As he recounted in his 2007 memoirs, Republicans under his leadership 
learned "to start every policy initiative from as far to the political 
right as we could." The effect was to "move the center farther to the 
right," drawing the triangulating Clinton along with it.

President-elect Obama can learn something from Mr. DeLay's confession: 
Centrism is a chump's game. Democrats have massive majorities these days 
not because they waffle hither and yon but because their historic 
principles have been vindicated by events. This is their moment. Let the 
other side do the triangulating.


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