openleft

Well, all the goodbye posts have been made, so this is really it.

Comments on articles will continue to work for seven days after the articles were posted. After that point, Open Left will become frozen in time.

This is, both ironically and fittingly, an open thread.

It is time to re-open this oft fractious, frequently inspiring, deeply committed, strongly analytical, activist, and skeptical community.

The discussions that need to be done, need to be done at sites exactly like openleft.

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Should the people of a given country be allowed to vote in free and fair elections, even if the people they elect are fundamentally hostile to the United States?

That is the great question which is facing America today, as protests have toppled the leader of Tunisia and now threaten the presidency of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

More below.

Almost everybody agrees that Mr. Mubarak is a dictator who does not respect human rights or promote democracy. He is a typical example of the authoritarian leader, whose values are fundamentally at odds with those of the United States. It is quite conceivable that the current protests will end in bloodshed, with the military firing upon civilians in a Bloody Sunday-style massacre.

In a perfect world, a peaceful revolution would topple Mr. Mubarak and install a new democratic government. Said government would be moderate, friendly to the West, and firmly against Islamic extremism.

Unfortunately, the truth is that Mr. Mubarak’s strongest political opponents are the Muslim Brotherhood, a proudly Islamist movement with broad popular support. If the protests in Egypt succeed in toppling the dictator, the most likely situation is the formation (through free and fair elections) of an Islamist government hostile to the United States.

Therein lies America’s dilemma – betray its ideals and support an “ally,” or keep its ideals and allow an anti-American government to take power.

Historically, the United States has chosen the former option. During the Cold War, dictators were always perceived as better than popularly elected Communist governments. Today replace Communism with Islamism, and one gets the same idea.

Yet think about this: why do the people of Egypt so dislike the United States? Why would they most likely elect, if given a choice, an anti-American government?

The answer, of course, is because the United States keeps on supporting dictators like Mr. Mubarak! In fact, that is why Osama bin Laden attacked the United States – because it continues allying with dictators in the Middle East, in direct contradiction of its democratic values.

Why does the United States support these dictators? Because it knows free democratic elections will result in anti-American governments. Why would elections result in anti-American governments? Because the United States keeps on supporting dictators who oppress the people. And on and on the cycle goes.

The problem is that dictators may not stay in power forever. A U.S.-supported dictator, if unpopular enough, may fall. Iran and Vietnam are just two examples in which this happened. Today Iran is a determined foe of the United States. On the other hand, the communist government in Vietnam is quite friendly to America.

In the short term supporting friendly dictators might benefit American interests. In the long run, however, supporting those who oppress their people probably does more harm than good to America – and more importantly, to the cause of freedom and democracy.

Thanks for being part of this community, and thank you for letting me develop my voice and ideas in concert with your voice and your ideas.  In 2007, Chris, Mike, and I started OpenLeft based on the idea that there was a new ideologically left-wing yet open set of actors on stage.  I still think this is true, and perhaps, there’s some of that going on right now in the uprisings in the Middle East.  Though it’s in fashion, I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Egypt, except to note that Facebook will totally set everyone free.  Thanks, Zuck!

The signs of a world undergoing profound change are everywhere.  Wikileaks is a genuine social innovation, a new form of collaborative media that scales what Daniel Ellsberg did.  The political blogosphere, and then the financial blogs, have sketched an open counter-elite that can truly challenge the existing financial oligarchs’ intellectual stronghold on our social order.  Much of the world is overthrowing the Washington consensus, and our elites are naked to the world in terms of their own incompetence and ignorance.

After OpenLeft, I worked for Congressman Alan Grayson, in what was the best job of my life.  He used to joke when he hired me that most Congressmen have staffers, while I had a Congressman.  Man did we have a good time, fighting the good fight.  And we accomplished a whole lot – the first audit of the Federal Reserve in history is being done right now, in part because of Grayson.  And actually, as I think about it right now, working for Grayson was a lot like blogging.  Blogging is its own form of writing, at once conversational and collaborative.  You aren’t in a room, with the door closed, trying to think up the brilliant phrase that will turn the world on its head.  You’re riding the wave.  You’re interacting with thousands.  You’re getting steamed by commenters, the flame wars and the critics, and your friends gone right and gone wrong.  At its best, blogging is a democratic space, a necessary ingredient of what Lawrence Goodwyn pointed out was a predicate to the great social movements in American history.  

OpenLeft was such a space, which is why many of us are sad about today.  It was a space to which all of us contributed.  It’s not that bloggers, commenters, and audience are going away, never to be heard from again.  I’m still around, you can find me at @matthewstoller on Twitter, stirring up trouble and ideas.  The rest of the gang is going to be on the internets as well.  But there’s a mixture that will be missing.  I know this because of the people who called me when I worked for Grayson, some of my coworkers and interns, who were part of the OpenLeft world.  There was a very specific, I don’t know what to call it, but flavor, a code, perhaps, a way of seeing the world that we all shared, and share.  When we got together at Netroots Nation, or in the comments sections, or when I meet a reader, we had and have a bond.

We can create that space again.  I suspect it will be created, in much larger forums than we ever imagined.  Humans can accomplish profoundly incredible feats when challenged.  I keep seeing Egyptians saying that they never dreamed these days would come, when their people would rise up.  I cannot right now imagine such a day for Americans, but that does not mean it won’t happen.  It means that it will happen in a way that I will not expect.  Perhaps some of you will lead such a consciousness raising moment.  The great social movements in American history worked that way, with generations passing down memories of dissent, until there was a disruptive break-out social innovation, like the farmer’s cooperatives of the 1880s, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, or the boycotts and marches of the 1960s.  In Poland, Solidarity came from the memories of worker strikes in the 1950s, and I suspect that we will discover the roots of what is happening in Egypt come from something similar.  Like Facebook!  Zuck is so dreamy, did you see the Social Network?  It was awesome!  Oscars here we come!

We’re in a darkening period in history, there’s no doubt about that.  And I’m not a believer in progress as an inherent fact of life, I’m more of a stuff just happens kind of guy.  Before the Civil War, American slaves didn’t believe in progress.  And why should they have believed in progress?  Many of them died in chains, their lives used purely as profit generators for the “owners” who often whipped and raped them.  But they believed in dignity, and righteousness.  That attitude comes closer to what I believe, than the frustratingly callous narrative which says that life in America always gets better, and if you don’t see that, then you don’t belong.  Suffering and pain is real and inherent to life, and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you to feel those emotions.  In fact there’s something wrong with you if you don’t feel them.  “Winning” or being on top isn’t meaning, meaning is meaning.  

During Grayson’s (and my) fight to audit the Federal Reserve, I had a conversation with William Greider, one of my heroes.  Greider wrote a book you should all read called The Secrets of the Temple, about the people who really run America.  He was appalled at the secret bailout run through the Fed, and worried that this was the final nail in the coffin of any sort of democratic impulse in America.  I responded with, the financial oligarchs have certainly taken a bunch of wealth and power, but they have also made their position explicit.  We run the world, they said, you don’t.  Making such an explicit statement about your own power reveals profound weakness.  And we’re seeing a catastrophic loss of legitimacy across all of our cultural institutions as a result, both liberal and illiberal alike.  That loss is reasonable, and we should go with it, not hold onto dying political entities that succeed only through deception and raw power.  We should innovative into the changes, take advantage of them to create new spaces like that created by Wikileaks, rather than throw good money after bad.

And so, I say a kind of goodbye, and a thank you for the collaborative work we’ve done together.  Change is what happens.  It’s sad, but I would be worried if we didn’t change after this experiment.  America is poorer and weaker than it was when we started this site, as is the Democratic Party.  Wealth stratification is higher, and the policies of the Bush administration on endless war and financial market-rigging are now openly embraced by the elites of both parties.  But none of that changes that OpenLeft is and was a great community, and an important experience for all of us.  It is now our task to spread the values that we shared, that flavor, into much bigger forums.  I hope all of you try to do that.  Maybe, some of us will succeed, but certainly, all of us will find meaning and righteousness in our lives and in the lives we touch.

This has been a wonderful community to be a very small part of. When Matt and Chris said they were leaving MyDD, I knew I would be following them to wherever they were going. I thought they were full of wild and crazy ideas, but ones that could be implemented.

They knew that principles mattered because they set the course of events.  Principles told you when you were veering off course.  

My identifier on this site was this quote from a Matt Stoller piece during the 2008 election cycle

“Incrementalism isn’t a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place”

I have been doing politics in different ways at different levels for many years. From being one of the founders of the first women’s “liberation” group in Boston, to marching in the streets against war and for equality, to helping to make films about the history of the left and its repression in America, to being involved organizationally with the abortion rights movement.  Being a liberal, one who thought we should be loud about our liberalism….Well, it was often a very lonely place for an unreconstructed liberal like me.

You know that hackneyed phrase.  “I haven’t changed, I haven’t left the Demcoratic party, the Democratic party left me,”?  It is always used by right wingers to justify themselves…for whatever heinous betrayal of principles they have just engaged in. However for me, it’s also true.  I haven’t changed, I am just the liberal I always was. It’s just that the Democratic party has become less so.  However, I keep refusing to accept that that is to be the final outcome, a constant drift rightward.  So I try mightily to pull it back to where it once was

The community on the internet and on the blogs, alleviated that sense of loneliness.  Actually it made me realize I wasn’t the only one who was crazy.  Crazy for freedom and equality and all those words everyone uses and abuses. To me the truest and most fundamental expression of freedom and equality are to be found in that space known as progressivism now and liberalism then.  

Matt was very right about the dangers of incrementalism.  If the arc of change is too long and too curvy, it gets diverted from its final object. Diverted by corruption, diverted by fatigue, diverted by a misplaced sense of comity, diverted by money and the distortion in power that money creates, and diverted by the idea that if change doesn’t come now it will come later.  Well it may, but it won’t,  by then be the change that is needed and that we liberals have fought for. It won;t be the change people NEED.  The more it gets diverted, the less power real people have to make the change that is best for themselves.  It is a downward spiral instead of an upward one. Patience is not always a virtue.

FDR made big change and he made it fast. It has had a lasting effect.  We are still trying to fill in the gaps in the vision he brought for.

I want to thank Matt and Chris for the oppurtunity they gave me to write for this wonderful blog. When Matt asked me to write here, I replied I wasn;t a good enough writer.  But he said I stuff to write about, that I was passionate about…so I did.  I hope I got better.  

I want to thank Paul Rosenberg for all his wonderful posts and the help he has extended to me since he’s been editor.  And to Mike Lux for being himself, smart, left but centered.  And to Adam Bink for being himself as well and fixing my techno screw ups. ( Adam say hi to your mom for me)

I have been asked to write about abortion, choice and women at Crooks and Liars.  I am thrilled to do so.

And I want to thank my colleagues here at Open Left when we won the Pub Quiz at Netroots Nation when we were in Pittsburgh in 2009. I never had more fun at a conference in my life.  Maybe that’s why John asked me to write for C&L!

To the commenters on this site, I want to say that this is smartest, most insightful and most courteous group of commenters on the internet. I thank you for letting me write for you.  

Please see the end for my thanks yous and where to find me after today. I have opted to close with an attempt to describe the field of play -D

Shortly after Kerry’s loss in 2004, at MyDD, Chris wrote “Conservatism is our enemy” which I think is the first time I ever encountered a direct ideological assault on conservatism itself.  Along with Phil Agre’s rightly famous essay on the subject, it began me on a road and mission to better understanding this beast.  Everything I have learned to date from then continues to bolster Chris’ original thesis.  Conservativism is still the primary enemy of progress, justice, fairness and widespread happiness for humanity.  It remains a destructive and corrosive force on the institutions of democracy and the single biggest obstacle to world peace.

If I have had a broad meta thesis here at Open Left, it is that the true fight is one of ideas and thus ideology.  We must reject the mushy centrist claim that ideology is necessarily an evil.  Not only is it not necessarily evil, ideology is necessary period.  The fights over parties, the media, particular policies and tactics are important, but my read on the broad sweep of history is that when the dominant ideas are bad, the parties will behave stupidly, the media will fail to correct them and the policies will be destructive.  There is a reason Canada, the UK and the US all elected right wing governments in the 80s.  There is a reason Obama’s team could not even consider a new WPA or even ask for a big-enough stimulus.  Bad ideas are still dominant.  I see no refuge in any 3rd party, because I see no reason such a party would not itself be quickly co-opted by the same bad ideas upon attaining power or in order to attain power.  I want to fight bad ideas directly.

America (and the world) needs more liberals and less conservatives.   Conservatives are not an immutable force of nature.  The number of them can be reduced, the extremity of their beliefs can be dampened and the sternness of the opposition to them can be bolstered.  I never really could decide if America really is a “center-right” nation (because “center” is bereft of meaning) but I do know one of the few things Villagers get right is the basic point that liberals cannot win many political fights when they are outnumbered by self-identified conservatives 2:1 or 3:2.  I started here writing about unstacking the deck, analyzing how the institutions themselves too often favour conservative outcomes, but the ideology demographic is a deck badly in need of restacking too.

I have taken a few shots at answering some of the questions that surround ideology which are almost completely ignored in the American media outside of a few blogs.  What is conservatism?  What is liberalism?  These are not trivial questions but they are essential to understanding the core of what drives the political debate.  Why do most people who are pro-life usually want lower taxes and less regulation?  Why do people who love capital punishment tend to detest environmentalism?  These issues appear randomly allocated but they’re really not.  The left-right divide is not, contra some claims, arbitrary or meaningless.

It’s a complicated subject and the debate often loses the thread because of isolated individuals who can break any ideological spectrum or model I’ve yet seen proposed.  Instead of a line with two end points maybe we need 4 quadrants on 2 dimensions.   Maybe it is 8 octrants on 3 dimensions?  No matter what taxonomy you propose, where do you put people who never think politically and claim no ideology?  They’re not necessarily centrists just because they haven’t picked a label.  It can quickly lose comprehensibility which makes the analysis meaningless through burdensome complexity.  For most purposes the left-right line actually serves pretty well, imperfect but a good shorthand since the great mass of people tend to fall on it.  There’s little point using a model that includes things like ‘communitarians’ and ‘libertarians’ when they usually aren’t any appreciable impact to the debate.  Sure, they’re out there, but they’re more or less a rounding error.  Even rare exceptions from these groups that do matter, like Ayn Rand only matter because one of the big groups adopted them.  Rand may fit better to be understood as a libertarian (or one of the 31 flavours thereof) but she’s only notable because conservatives swallowed up her economic model.  They don’t advocate her bohemian lifestyle or atheism.  Just the whole “eat the poor because we can” thing.

Unfortunately, the liberal consensus has not come along far enough that we have generally agreed “consevativism is the primary problem” in order to move the next step which is “how do we make there be less of them and more of us?”  Putting aside the problem of “too many neoliberals” too (and whether they should be understood as conservatives) there’s simply too many people on the left who think the fight is really about the media, or party politics.  Even the simple dictum “more and better Democrats” isn’t truly a consensus since every effort to make “better” (which means liberal) Democrats is fraught with controversy and finger pointing if it doesn’t go perfectly.  The burden is still very much on liberals to make the case for primarying Joe Liberman or Blanche Lincoln and that case depends not on the moral and ethical analysis of their voting records and behaviour, but on a Democrat winning the general election for those seats.  The onus should really be on the pragmatists as to why we should tolerate the occasional right wing Democrat and the blame owned by them when such people sabotage liberal governing priorities if we had passed on a decent chance of replacing them.

Yet another problem are the so-called pragmatists who have an incoherent ideology of rejecting ideology and think they are somehow above the fray of ideas, that somehow there is some notion of “workable solutions” that is independent of an ideology which tells you what constitutes problems needing solving, and what an acceptable solution looks like.

These fights will have to go on.  Conservatism is a destructive system of hierarchy and zero-sum power seeking that has no place in the running of a modern society.  It is some kind of evolutionary anachronism, the ingrained desire to accumulate power and resources to the exclusion of “the other” against times of need in Hobbes’ jungle.  Since about 1850 we (in the West at least) have lived in the world of surplus resources where there really is enough stuff for everyone to go around, but still we live with about half the population intuitively working the politics of a Malthusian state where every hamburger you eat is one of my kids going hungry.  Even today in the shadow of the Great Recession, world GDP per capita (PPP) stands at over $10,000 per year.  About 1 billion live on less than $400 a year.  Another billion live on less than $750 a year.  Clearly there is enough to go around, we just suck at distribution.  Is it really so crazy to imagine we could get those bottom 2 billion up to $1000 or $2000 a year?

In the field of hard science, humanity languished in darkness for most of its history with only the occasional bright flash of discovery in such moments where stability and resources allowed such things as “scholars” to exist, and prevailing norms allowed them to pursue truth without fear of offending some deity.  This all really changed not because of some particular hard factual discovery like calculus, gravity or optics, but because science developed a reliable method for seeking and identifying truth.  Today we have no name for this, it is simply “the scientific method.”  It doesn’t need a name because there is no competing model.  Certainly there are people who reject the model, but they aren’t practicing science and any correct answers they produce are nothing but fluke.

In the field of pursuing the ideal human society, liberalism is the science of pursuing human well being.  It combines the empiricism and rationalism of science with the goal of maximizing human happiness.  The process is iterative and the specific means change as well meaning ideas are found wanting, and as science improves our understanding of humans themselves and what it takes to make them happy.  There is no other school of thought that both seeks to improve the lot of all, and actually can do it.  The ultimate goal of liberalism is that we should not need the word “liberalism” because no one would need a special word to describe the self-evident way people determine solutions to societal problems.  That’s what liberalism is, and why it must win or all humanity will fall back into ruin, scarcity, ignorance and fear.  We live in a world with plenty of those things, but also a world where solutions to them are in reach, which was never true any time before.  Apr