{"id":13480,"date":"2010-12-09T17:11:39","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T22:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2010\/12\/09\/13480.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:08","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:08","slug":"betrayed-again-curse-you-moder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2010\/12\/09\/betrayed-again-curse-you-moder\/","title":{"rendered":"Betrayed again! Curse you, moderation!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger feels it somehow incumbent on him to comment on The Deal<\/a>. Because everybody else is commenting, and because nobody that I read is saying the stuff that I would say. Which, alas, is the same stuff I always say in this situation.\n

What I’ve been seeing falls into two categories. First, there are a bunch of people who feel (rightly) that this deal is terrible for the country and terrible for progressives, and also feel (wrongly, imao) that Our Only President is to blame for this terrible deal. Second, there are a bunch of people who feel (rightly) that Our Only President got pretty much the best terrible deal he could get at this time, and that there are lots of other people who should shoulder far more of the blame, including (a) Senate Democrats, (ii) House Democrats, and (3) the American People, who persist in electing a bunch of people from the Other Party (and a handful from Our Party as well) who persist in sacrificing just about everything to the Grail of minimizing taxes on the wealthy.\n

But here’s the thing—a pretty fair number of pixels have been spilled in the latter group of posts on correcting the first group of posts. I think this is wrong.\n

That is, I think the first group—the Obama-blamers—are wrong in their analysis, but the second group—the Obama-defenders—are wrong to say they got it wrong. That’s largely because I don’t think the first group are engaging in analysis<\/i>, so much as activism<\/i>. And while blaming Our Only President is wrong as analysis, it ain’t wrong as activism.\n

It’s actually really, really important for people on the Left to cry out that we have been betrayed! betrayed by moderation! Again!\n

There’s been some interesting discussion lately (at Jon Bernstein’s Plain Blog<\/a>, among others) about policy negotiations and party politics. Mr. Bernstein suggests that many constituencies within my Party’s broader coalition have specific policy goals that they want met, which means that you can’t buy them off with symbolic votes. That is, for many of the people in the Other Party who give time and money in support of their candidates, it is enough that their officials vote the right way, even in a losing cause. For those of us who care about Labor, we want (f’r’ex) card check passed<\/i>, not just voted on. For those of us who care about GLBT rights, we wanted the military to accept gay recruits; we aren’t going to be happy with a symbolic vote. We want Cap and Trade—well, we’re not real excited about Cap and Trade, but we’re certainly furious that two years of Our Party in charge of two branches didn’t give us any<\/i> serious policy, just symbolic votes. And we didn’t just want health care passed<\/i>, we wanted it to cover everyone and provide a check on private insurance; we had actual policy preferences. Because of those actual policy preferences, are Representatives are likely to accept 80% of what we want, because after all, that is 80% of what we want.\n

I don’t know if that’s true, or if that’s a real difference between the Parties. I don’t know that, in the end, we are more likely to withhold votes or donations or energy from incumbents who nobly fail than the other Party’s incumbents. But I do think that there has been, over the last three decades or more, a substantial difference in how loud we squeal when we don’t get what we want. And I think we should squeal louder.\n

Look—Our Only President did a cost-benefit analysis of some kind, and decided that this was the point he wanted to be at. And I trust his judgment on that, honestly. He’s certainly in a better position to judge it than I am. But what I can do, what you can do, what Left Blogovia can do, is to increase the cost of giving up what we want. We can holler like stuck pigs when we get only 30% of what we want. We can make it clear that part of making that deal is listening to us scream our heads off. And we can make it clear to everybody that we will give our incumbents hell if they make deals that stink, even if it’s a smart deal to make. Even if our analysis is that it was the right deal for our people to make. We are going to stay unhappy and we’re going to make a lot of noise, and sooner or later we need to be bought off with some real<\/i> policy, if only to shut us the hell up.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger shakes his fist at the sky. And threatens to shake it again, if you don’t watch out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19244,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480\/revisions\/19244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}