Matt Taibbi wrote a polemical piece a few days ago – describing the Obama administration as being in the pocket of big financial interests. The substance of his criticism is reasonably accurate. 2009 has been a pretty good year for those folks, and the proposed measures to go after them have been relatively toothless.
But…being on the right side of an argument doesn’t make you right. And Taibbi risks treading into the territory of ending up at the right conclusion but doing so in all the wrong ways.
To illustrate, critics have pointed out that, well, he’s asking rather a lot of the administration and doing so in a way that doesn’t seem to admit any chance that they might have a legitimate reason for their decisions. Tim Fernholz has a pretty solid takedown, which documents a ton of facts Taibbi marshals that turn out to be massaged at best, or clearly wrong in a lot of cases. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias point out that the true villain in all this, which Taibbi virtually ignores, is our institutiona structure that makes legislative change hostage to the 60th vote in the Senate.
Robert Farley points out, rightly I think, that a lot of this is beside the point. Taibbi’s piece is deliberately written in a style that is designed to hurl bombs in the area of facts – not necessarily to marshall a set of strong arguments in favor of a reasoned position. That he ends up being more or less right in his broad sketches is really all that is expected.
So the real question is: where do we go after reading this debate? And that’s where Taibbi’s black-or-white approach really starts generating problems. Against these sort of criticisms, like clockwork, comes this response from Taibbi, accusing those who disagree with him of suffering from “Obamania.”
It’s an incredibly frustrating and silly response, and really serves to clarify the actual disagreement here.
Taibbi thinks that the sole purpose of a citizen in a democracy is to advocate for the position you want. If a politician does something else, you rage against the dying of the light. That’s fine as far as it goes. It’s great even. We need to have people who feel that way. They push the boundaries. They help to keep people honest and accountable. Great. So in that sense there’s nothing wrong with Taibbi’s original post. It serves a purpose.
But, there is a different way of thinking about a person’s role. Some folks feel that sense of personal motivation, but are also inclined to ponder the larger question of not just what I want, but what someone who wants what I want should actually be able to GET. That’s where I’m at. It’s not that I don’t hold a lot of desire for things to be radically different – I just have a different sense about how worthwhile it is for me to value the process by which those things are attempted. I know society doesn’t share my opinions on a lot of things and I think it’s mostly my burden to figure out what I can actually get.
To clarify in broad strokes. Take a person who wants single-payer health care, absolute nuclear disarmament, a massive carbon tax, a huge tax increase on the wealthiest, reproductive freedom for every person in the world, US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, stronger environmental regulations, prison reform, a Supreme Court full of liberal justices, etc.
The extreme version of Taibbi is going to write scathing pieces every day of the week and twice on Sunday about how this administration promised to be something different, but turns out to be more of the same. In short, he’s a Nader voter. The extreme version of me is going to end up unemotionally assessing everything, and will probably end up with nothing because I observe and analyze a lot, but never get around to simply picking one thing to go after and fighting for it.
Neither of those extreme versions is particularly useful. But a world filled with people that trend to both sides–and who end up supporting each other–is a world that might actually get things done.
Anyways, back to the “Obamania” thing. The point here is that things like the ‘cult of personality’ arguments Taibbi tosses around completely eviscerate the delicate balance. His post demands that everyone in the world must behave like him in order to have the credibility to speak on these issues. It implies there is only one Correct kind of criticism–the form that he engages in. One that accepts no admission of practical difficulties, which insists until the very end a purity of will. Which says that the only proper relationship between citizen and leader is the issuance of demands.
It’s petty and it’s stupid, and it’s a destructive meta-theorization about the motives of people who provide an important backbone for any actual change. It’s not enough to just WANT something; you need to be able to understand that the world is full of people who don’t want it to happen with whom you have to deal. You can demand a purity of criticism and get nothing, or you can recognize that your perfect idea is going to get put through the wringer of political compromise and the result is fair more likely to turn out better for you if you can play ball.
When you alienate those who agree with you about the broad strokes, you’re going to stand very, very little chance of getting what you want in the details.
I know it’s frustrating that the debates over things like health care and financial reform involve the most conservative elements of the party getting tons of concessions and the left having to abandon things left and right. But you can’t lose track of the fact that the bill that will eventually pass is a major loss of the other side. The fact that it’s even up for debate is a MASSIVE concession to our side. The reason we have to hold our nose and vote for the bill that comes out of this process is that we CARE about getting the major elements – while the people who are demanding concessions all over the place would be perfectly willing to let it die.
We have a lot to lose and they don’t. If all you can do is hurl invective, you’re just not going to get very far in the face of that. In particular, accusing people of falling victim to “Obamania” isn’t going to help your case.