There’s an interesting whirligig underway over at TPMCafe where a bunch of us bloggers are debating the extent to which the “netroots” represent a new Left-bent political movement. (My own post mainly suggests that the very nature of internet-based political discourse creates limits to its utility as an ideological vehicle, which is a good thing).But because the kicker-offer of the debate, MyDD’s Matt Stoller, conducted a drive-by dissing of the 60s-era New Left and its ultimate influence, the discussion veered off into all sorts of odd historical byways. It then exploded with a post by labor-left economist Max Sawicky, who defended the comparative value of the New and Old Lefts as compared to the Progressive Netroots. Two Max-imalist sound bites really got the juices flowing:”The ‘Internet Left’ is mostly a brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.””The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Harrington, Saul Alinsky. What does the netroots read? Don’t Think of an Elephant?”The furor Max unleashed spilled out of the comments threads and onto other sites, where battles over the obscure legacy of various New Left and Marxist organizations rage on.It’s good clean fun. And it’s interesting to see criticism of the netroots from the left. Check it all out.

Given the raging debate over Iraq, it’s not surprising that on this particular Martin Luther King holiday, various observers are drawing parallels between King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and today’s anti-Iraq War movement. The most striking example was John Edwards’ direct evocation of King’s signature anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church nearly forty years ago–delivered by Edwards yesterday from the same pulpit, in which he called on Democrats to show moral fortitude by cutting off funding for an increased troop deployment in Iraq.Entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence,” King’s sermon was indeed about a lot more than the Vietnam War. And the “silence” he spoke of did not refer simply to reluctance to oppose the war–the anti-war movement was, after all, fully underway in 1967–but to those who in his view refused to see or talk about the connections between oppression of African-Americans in this country and oppression of “Asians, Africans and Latin Americans” by the United States and its allies in the name of the Cold War.From what we know of the historical context for King’s Riverside sermon, he was likely conducting a sort of two-front offensive aimed at two very different sets of critics of his leadership within the civil rights movement. On one side were those who urged him to mute his growing criticism of LBJ’s foreign policy–and even some aspects of domestic policy–as a distraction from the civil rights cause, and as a corrosive influence on establishment liberal support for that cause. And on the other side were more radical civil rights voices–e.g., Malcolm X and some of the early SNCC firebrands–who wanted to discard King’s strict policy of nonviolent protest. For King, the response to both was to underline the necessity of nonviolent social progress at home and abroad.What comes across from a reading of the sermon today is its consistent radicalism. Yes, King made some prudential arguments against the Vietnam War, including the resources it sapped from domestic priorities, the war’s disparate impact on minorities, and its essential futility in terms of conditions on the ground in Vietnam itself. But King’s real mission was a root-and-branch attack on the fundamental assumptions of Cold War liberalism. Calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King unsubtly suggested that his country had gotten itself on the wrong side of a “world revolution” for political and economic self-determination in which leadership had often been tacitly ceded to communists:

All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated.

The Riverside sermon is a sharp reminder that the core of King’s public ministry was the rigorous advocacy of a Gandhian nonviolence philosophy that he believed to be a practical extension of he Gospel of Jesus Christ. Reading it anew, I have little doubt that if MLK were alive and active today, he would not just be calling for a “redeployment” of U.S. troops from the Iraq civil war, but would be challenging the entire framework of the war with jihadist terrorism, including the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.I wouldn’t personally agree with him on that broader vision of world events, any more than I would have agreed with him that the Cold War was essentially the product of U.S. arrogance and militarism. But there’s not much point in honoring King’s memory without grappling with the full and (to use his own word) “disturbing” integrity of his prophetic stance.Progressives have long deplored the tendency of conservatives to selectively quote from King’s writings, and to use them to support policies (e.g., “color-blind” opposition to affirmative action measures) that arguably would subvert everything he fought for. But progressives need to beware of a similar, if more benign, temptation to quote King out of context. Citing MLK’s Riverside sermon as moral authority for demanding that Democrats support a cut-off of funding for an expansion of the U.S. presence in Iraq is a bit like citing the Sermon on the Mount in talking points for a minimum wage increase. It’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the larger points, and reduces prophecy to politics.

I deliberately waited a while to write anything about Bush’s latest “big speech” on Iraq, because it’s generally more interesting to weigh reactions after the spin has died down and public opinion has begun to congeal. But I don’t think there’s any possible conclusion to reach other than that the whole Bush “new direction” has been a dismal and completely unnecessary flop.The speech itself was most notable in that it did not even remotely live up to the White House’s own advance billing. We were told Bush was finally and fully going to embrace the counter-insurgency strategy that so many military experts had been urging on him for at least a year. Instead, we got nothing on that front other than a ritual recitation of the barest bones of the strategy, the clear-hold-build formula (supplemented by a lame-o dollop of money to throw at unemployed Iraqis). We were told he’d admit the failure of his old policies. Instead, he allowed as how 2006 wasn’t exactly a great year in Iraq.I personally expected Bush to provide one “surprise,” by announcing some token of a political breakthrough in Iraq–a “benchmark” actually met–such as an impending deal on distribution of oil revenues, but we didn’t get that, either. And that’s a reflection of Bush’s weird and continuing inversion of the growing feeling in this country that we should withdraw sooner rather than later if Iraqis don’t begin to live up to their own responsibilities for self-government. Bush is essentially saying we’ll withdraw later rather than sooner–and maybe never withdraw–if they continue to polarize along sectarian lines. He’s not stopping or preventing civil war; he’s enabling it.For that reason, the most bizarre feature of the speech was Bush’s insistence that the whole “surge” was simply an effort to support an Iraqi government initiative to control violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province; indeed, he expressed great confidence that Maliki was finally biting the bullet and was willing to remove “restrictions” on troop operations that might involve conflict with Shi’a militias. But right up to the moment of the speech, Maliki’s staff was out there constantly saying they didn’t want or need more American troops. And if they said or did anything new to suggest a sudden willingness to mess with the Mahdi Army, it didn’t make the news.Add in the factor that the new troop deployments are not that large, and will take a while to execute, and you’ve got a formula for almost certain military and political failure. So why did Bush do this? And why all the hype?You’d have to guess he seized upon the one vaguely new-sounding thing he could do that didn’t cross the self-imposed line that has divided him from Democrats, from many Republicans, from the Iraq Study Group recommendations, from Iraqi public opinion, and from U.S. public opinion; he couldn’t bring himself to begin withdrawing troops. He couldn’t realistically get the troops he needed for the kind of big-time escalation that many on the Right favored, and that commanders in the field considered essential for an actual victory over insurgents and militias. So he went with a pallid proposal linked to overblown rhetoric.I know a large and growing number of fellow progressive bloggers have seized on Bush’s saber-rattling towards Iran and Syria, followed by several mysterious military maneuvers and one weird confrontation with Iranian embassy employees in Kurdistan, to suggest with alarm that the administration is about to deliberately widen the Iraq war by provoking Tehran and Damascus into armed conflict. I have a hard time believing that; where the hell is the Pentagon going to get the resources for a regional war?But in any event, the pallid support levels, even among Republicans, for Bush’s Iraq plan, could derail it even without even affirmative action by Congress to get in the way by, say, restricting funds. The pending “no confidence” resolution now in the works could effectively reinforce the clear judgment of voters in November.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

At the risk of stating the semi-obvious, George W. Bush’s decision to go on national television tomorrow night and announce a plan to deploy 20,000 more U.S. troops in a long-term operation to “secure” Baghdad and some Sunni territory as well, is as mystifying as anything “the decider” has done in the course of his mystifying presidency.Hardly anyone thinks this deployment will work, even within the Pentagon and the White House, as the vast number of blind quotes in the news media questioning the decision makes clear. (Fred Kaplan’s exhaustive review of the operational implausibility of the Bush plan is definitely worth reading). It’s also clear the Maliki government, on whose willingness to fully commit Iraqi forces the slim chances of the whole enterprise rest, is being dragged kicking and screaming into line with Washington’s edict. And that’s hardly a surprise, since “clearing” Baghdad of “terrorists” or “extremists” or whatever Bush chooses to call them, will inevitably involve armed clashes with the Mahdi Army, one of the pillars of Maliki’s political base.Even fans of the idea of deploying more troops typically think the troop levels Bush is talking about will be insufficient to make a difference, other than convincing Iraqis that we’ll never, ever leave. And then there’s the little matter of Bush’s willingness to give American public opinion a big middle finger; as new polls indicate, despite relatively strong (if probably temporary) Repubublican rank-and-file support for the escalation, it’s anathema to the coalition of Democrats and independents that flipped Congress in November.The big symbolic factor in Bush’s decision is supposedly this: he’s finally abandoned the old stay-the-course rap, even if he doesn’t acknowledge the shift tomorrow night. But the strange timing of the escalation strategy helps illustrate something about the administration’s post-invasion Iraq policies that has often been obscured by the consistent happy-talk: they’ve repeatedly flip-flopped, but almost always far too late.Think about it. Rumsfeld took us into Iraq absolutely determined not to conduct an occupation, assuming instead that he could turn over the country to Iraqi exile politicians. That determination barely outlasted the invasion itself. When chaos broke out, administration talking heads first welcomed the phenomenon as the natural exuberance of a liberated people, and savaged anyone who suggested an organized insurgency. When that claim became increasingly absurd, the Bushies described the insurgency as a temporary rear-guard action by Baathists with no real popular base. Then they shifted to a description of the newly-recognized insurgency as composed primarily of “foreign fighters” recruited by al-Qaeda (which, BTW, was thereby “pinned down” in the “flypaper” of Iraq, and couldn’t conduct terrorism operations anywhere else, until they did). When the indigenous Sunni insurgency was finally acknowleged, the administration suggested its increasing ferocity was a sign of desparation. For many months, the president’s men dismissed intra-Pentagon arguments for adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy. And they finally started talking about “clear, hold and build” strategies–and have now placed their chief advocate, Gen. David Petraus, in charge of the “new direction” in Iraq–when the conditions necessary for successful counter-insurgency have all but vanished.What has united all these horribly belated “decisions,” of course, has been the administration’s remarkably consistent resistance to empirical evidence of failure and folly. And by that standard, there’s nothing about the “new direction” that really breaks new ground.

Props to Markos and the New York Times’ Carl Hulsey for noting something in the just-enacted Democratic House rules package that I missed: the retention of Newt Gingrich’s one good idea–term limits on committee chairmen.Neither of them get into the grittiest problem with this idea: the understandable reluctance of African-American chairs to give up their newfound power in the same seniority system that was used for so very long to obstruct and delay civil rights, and to marginalize and even humiliate minority Members.And by explaining the term limits issue strictly in terms of Caucus and leadership discipline, Markos and Hulsey also miss another well-identified problem with Perpetual Chairmanships: the tendency of Perpetual Chairmen to get trapped in the Iron Triangle uniting the executive-branch programs they supposedly oversee, the special-interest and advocacy groups that exist to defend and/or expand those programs (most of whom are avid campaign contributors), and their own professional committee staffs, who are typically cycling through the other sides of the triangle.According to Hulsey, Speaker Pelosi has privately indicated that the term-limits decision could be reversed later on. Let’s hope that’s not the case. There are other ways to ensure that minority voices in the House Caucus are heard; for one thing, “term-limited” committee and subcommittee chairs can be moved to equally influential perches. In any event, it will certainly be hard for this Democratic Congress to pose as a vehicle for “reform” if it backtracks on one of the most ancient and well-abused privileges of the Old Order.

It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the newly Democratic House finally passed lobbying reform (and less noticed but equally important, budget reform) legislation in its first moment in power.:But as today’s DLC New Dem Dispatch noted, lobbying reform won’t mean much if Congress doesn’t go on to deal with the real source of special-interest abuse in Washington–our crazy system of financing elections:

The much-anticipated new restrictions on lobbyist relationships with members, which were enacted late yesterday with only one dissenting vote, are fine so far as they go, though a willingness to strictly enforce bans on the worst abuses (e.g., “revolving door” arrangements that tempt members to lobby the lobbyists for future jobs) will be critical. Moreover, since most of the banned activities will be permitted if conducted as part of campaign fundraisers, we think it’s important that House Democrats signal a renewed interest in cutting the link between campaign contributions and legislation, preferably by jump-starting progress toward serious campaign finance reform, including public financing of congressional elections. A good place to start might be a fresh look at the voluntary public financing plan proposed by Al Gore in 2000, which is one of the few proposals certain to pass constitutional muster.

Aside from those on both the demand and supply sides of campaign contribution checks who prefer the current system, the main sources of indifference to the kind of public financing in place in virtually every other democratic nation are twofold: the immovable object of the Supreme Court’s infinitely regrettable doctrine that political contributions are hyper-constitutionally-protected “free speech,” and the movable but daunting obstacle of public opposition to the use of taxpayer funds for political campaigns. There are many possible if unsatisfying paths around the Supreme Court’s roadblock, as illustrated by the various state systems of voluntary but politically coercive public financing schemes. And at the federal level, as the New Dem Dispatch suggests, Al Gore’s long-forgotten but promising proposal for a public financing fund for congressional campaigns, developed by then-Gore-advisor and now Progressive Policy Institute scholar Paul Weinstein, is worth another look. The key thing for progressives is not to give up, for even a moment, on public campaign financing as a goal. It may take a while to get there, but leadership requires, well, leadership, and succumbing to the current crazy and corruption-feeding system is not acceptable. This is something on which progressives who disagree on many other topics ought to be able to unite.

Last night, over at New Republic‘s The Plank, Michael Crowley marveled at the appearance of Rep. Barney Frank in the chair of the U.S. House of Representatives (sitting in for newly-elected Speaker Nancy Pelosi), describing the visual impact on him as one of “cognitive dissonance,” and a reminder of how much things changed on November 7.This immediately reminded me of a much earlier appearance in the chair by Frank, in the early 1980s, during one of those interminable end-of-year round-the-clock sessions when junior Members were often dragooned into presiding in the wee hours. During a tedious speech by Republican Rep. Marjorie Holt on school prayer, Holt referred to America as “a Christian nation.” Frank interrupted her to observe: “If this is a Christian nation, why does some poor Jew have to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?” Interestingly enough, when I Googled the quote to find a source, what popped up first was a reference to the hilarious incident in a 1984 piece by none other than Charles Krauthammer, appearing in–you guessed it–The New Republic–a piece reposted on the TNR site about two weeks ago. The more things change….

It has been much unremarked given the holidays and the Gerald Ford reminiscences, but on New Year’s Eve, Seymour Martin Lipset, the great American political sociologist, died after a debilitating illness following a stroke in 2001.Marty Lipset was part of an amazing generation of New York Jewish intellectuals of the mid-to-late twentieth century that was educated at City College, went through immersion in socialist theoretical combat, and emerged to make all sorts of contributions, some Left, some Right, to the political life of the United States. Lipset’s most important contribution was his analysis of “American exceptionalism,” and especially his elucidation of the cultural and social factors that prevented the American working class from the commitment to socialism that characterized their counterparts in Europe. Lipset is also well-known in Canada for his long-standing and serious efforts to examine differences between U.S. and Canadian culture and politics.On a more personal level, I would note Lipset’s involvement late in his career with the Progressive Policy Institute, and his work on the emergence of post-socialist progressive politics in the 1980s and 1990s. During my own long association with the DLC/PPI, I have had the opportunity to meet two “living legends” (politicians aside). One was Betty Friedan, at a lunch with Will Marshall to discuss a New Democrat magazine article that Friedan was writing. And the other was Marty Lipset.

Jonathan Cohn has a fascinating article up on the New Republic site touting Denmark as a country that has managed to post world-class economic growth and employment figures despite maintaining (with some important reforms) a generous social safety net. The whole article’s worth reading and pondering, but there’s one detail in Cohn’s account of the Danish experience that especially caught my attention:

Denmark spends more than 4 percent of its GDP on its labor market programs–the most of any country in the n Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) and more than 20 times what the United States spends on its worker-training programs

.There’s been a long-raging debate in U.S. progressive circles over the proper role, if any, of worker retraining initiatives in coping with job loss and other economic dislocations associated with both technological change and with globalization. Those of us from the Clintonian pro-trade persuasion are often accused of advocating better education, and particularly worker retraining, as a substitute for direct government efforts (e.g., trade restrictions) to prevent job dislocations before they happen. Indeed, deriding worker retraining opportunities as a sort of withered booby prize for people who ought to expect their government to protect the jobs they already have is a habit that’s recently spread from protectionist circles to many progressive writers and thinkers, mainly because of growing evidence that high skill levels don’t necessarily insulate workers from offshoring and other globalization-related dislocations.I certainly don’t think of worker retraining as a silver bullet, and don’t intend to get into the general argument over globalization in this post. But as Cohn’s article illustrates, before anyone buries worker retraining as one of many strategies for coping with globalization, maybe we should actually try it, because we haven’t. For all the talk about worker retraining, the U.S. had never made s significant investment in this resource as compared with other countries. And despite many proposals for overhauling our cramped, uneven and bureaucratized system of training programs, and despite several cosmetic changes (i.e., the Workforce Investment Act, following the Job Training Partnership Act), it’s still a mess, and hardly a genuine national commitment.The Clinton administration is partly to blame for the disconnect between its rhetoric of universal and easily accessed worker retraining resources and the underlying reality. This was, in fact, one of those “investments” that never much survived the initial Clinton budget, with its emphasis on deficit reduction. But in my view, the Congresses, including Democratic-controlled Congresses, of the early to mid-1990s, deserve more of the blame, thanks to their bipartisan deficit reduction strategy of freezing spending on various discretionary programs without setting real priorities among them. A new and robust commitment to worker retraining was one of the casualities of this everything’s-equal approach.There remain plenty of proposals out there for getting serious about worker retraining. Back in 1996, former PPI vice president and Under Secretary of Commerce Dr. Rob Shapiro suggested that the “non-discrimination rule” that denies companies tax write-offs for health care benefits unless they are offered to all employees be extended to training and retraining benefits. And it’s not that hard to figure out ways to cut through the bureaucracy and offer workers direct support for retraining, as illustrated by Paul Weinstein’s PPI proposal for “New Economy Scholarships.”My fear is that the debate over the role of worker retraining as a response to globalization is blocking investments and reforms in this area that no progressive should oppose. After all, no one pretends that any government action can eliminate job churn, job loss, or the need for individual workers to upgrade their skills. Why deny workers these opportunities? To prove a point about their insufficiency as a total solution to economic insecurity? Beats me.

One of the odd phenomena in the 2008 presidential runup is the disconnect between Rudy Giuliani’s strong GOP poll ratings and the CW that he can’t get the Republican nomination because of his socially liberal policy stands. Until recently, Rudy has floated above this disconnect, but now a leaked strategy document is giving his opponents an opening to bash him. According to the New York Daily News account of this document, Rudy’s self-identified problems are: “his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; ‘social issues,’ on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.”The leaked strategy document goes on to dwell at great length on a fifth problem, fundraising, and barely gets into the ideological issues he faces. You have to conclude from this document that this ideologically handicapped GOP presidential candidate has a host of preliminary handicaps, personal and ethical, that even his own braintrust considers potentially debilitating. I don’t know how Rudy intends to deal with these handicaps. But I do know how his conservative opponents will exploit them in the early ’08 caucus and primary states, and I suspect “America’s Mayor” will be reduced to “America’s Dogcatcher” before the deal goes down in 2008.