Several weeks ago TDS published a strategy memo which argued that participatory systems of democratic decision-making would not only give Americans more confidence in government but would also generally produce more progressive policies than the beltway consensus as well.
The current debate over the budget deficit provides a rather dramatic example of this proposition. A commentary in the New York Times noted the following:

With help from some of our techno-genies, (New York Times economics editor David Leonhardt) devised an interactive graphic that lets you choose from a menu of tax increases and spending cuts and benefit tweaks until the budget balances. In short, he crowd-sourced the deficit.
Nearly 9,000 readers worked the puzzle. Individually, they were all over the map. But as a group, they accomplished the goal by splitting the difference: almost exactly half the savings came from tax increases, half from spending cuts. Collectively, readers seemed to realize that the hole we’re in is too deep to be filled by tax increases alone or spending cuts alone.
The result is broadly consistent with polls, which show that a majority of American voters hate most tax increases and a majority hate cutting entitlements, but — confronted with a choice of one, the other or some of each — they’ll go for the hybrid.

The current Washington debate, on the other hand, is grotesquely overweighted toward spending cuts. Even the so-called “compromise” Gang of Six plan is expected to produce a proposal requiring three dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of higher revenue.
As Jon Chait notes:

Why such a skewed distribution? They’re trying to forge a compromise between Democrats who have a commitment to support certain programs and Republicans who oppose higher taxes as a matter of principle — and, indeed, hew to a longstanding doctrine that refuses to acknowledge any connection between tax levels and the deficit…inevitably, any deal between such mismatched sides is going to be skewed.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that the average reader of the New York Times is more liberal than the median American voter. But the fact that national polling data indicates broadly similar preferences for an approach balanced between tax increases and spending cuts suggests that a participatory democracy exercise giving several thousand Americans the opportunity to design a plan would produce a result that would be more progressive, more democratic and more acceptable to most Americans than anything likely to come out of Washington.
An approach of this kind would also have one other benefit: Republicans would hysterically oppose the idea because they could not control the outcome. This would dramatically show Americans how little they really care about the opinions of ordinary citizens and how hollow are their claims to be genuine representatives of the “real America”.

Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.

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Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?

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Democrats who grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s often feel a certain subtle disquiet when talking to politically active Dems who came of age during or after the 1980’s. The latter generally accept the modern world of prepared “talking points”, “sound bites” and “message discipline” as the “new normal” of political activity. To them, the hyper-partisan ideological clash of dueling frames and completely incompatible alternate realities simply “is” what American politics is about.
But taking all this for granted inescapably entails accepting a profoundly cynical and manipulative view of how politics should be conducted – a view that rejects any attempt to try to be “fair” or “accurate” or “objective.” It is a world where politicians and media figures will publically unite behind statements they know to be patently dishonest in order to drive a few simple propositions through the media blizzard and implant them in the minds of the voters.
From the point of view of Democrats, the last two years have provided example after example of this profound cynicism and manipulation on the part of the Republican Party and Fox News.

• Repeated assertions that Obama is “socialist” when he was in fact proposing policies originally developed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and endorsed at the time by leading Republicans.
• Repeated assertions that “tax cuts do not increase deficits” in utter and proud defiance of the laws of addition and subtraction.
• The near-maniacal repetition of the words “job-destroying” in front of any policy or action to be discredited as if robotic repetition was the same as the presentation of evidence.
• The presentation of over 100 individual TV segments on Fox News repeating the same 20 second videotape of two individuals at one polling place in 2008 as the “proof” that widespread voter intimidation actually occurs.
• The constant use of manipulative background visuals (heavy on American flags and bald eagles for positions that were favored) on Fox’s “news” programs, combined with talking points taken verbatim from Republican press releases flashed at the bottom of the TV screen.

When confronted with examples like these Republicans and conservatives have a simple reply: “both sides do it and Dems are even worse than we are.” Many conservatives quite genuinely and sincerely believe that the three major TV networks are just as biased and partisan as Fox News, that The New York Times is no more objective than The National Review and that Paul Krugman’s opinion on economic matters is not the slightest bit more informed and authoritative than Glen Beck’s.
In itself this is not surprising. People almost universally tend to perceive their own groups’ views as objective and the views of others as biased. Even in psychological lab experiments where groups are randomly divided into teams of “red” and “blue” and shown propositions where there is absolutely no objective “right” or “wrong” at all – simply two propositions or stimuli that are identical mirror-images of each other – a clear and powerful “my teams’ perspective is right, yours is biased” psychological effect quickly emerges. This is unfortunate, to be sure, but it is also certainly nothing new.
What is indeed new and profoundly disturbing, on the other hand, is that the traditional American ideals of honest debate and sincere discussion have themselves been substantially discarded. The goal of letting citizens hear a fair, unvarnished debate between advocates of competing ideas now only exists in a handful of debates between candidates during election years and has ceased to be an objective to be sought anywhere else in political life. Instead, in modern politics debate and discussion has increasingly come to resemble a clash between two cynical trial lawyers, each seeking to bully the witnesses, distort or suppress the evidence and bamboozle the jury.
Yet the abandonment of fair and genuine debate between equal advocates of opposing ideas is now asserted by Fox News to actually represent a new kind of “balance” or “fairness.” Despite Bill O’Reilly’s bullying of his guests and Glen Beck’s demonstrably false conspiracy narratives as well as the presentation of “experts” without credentials or “Democrats” whose last connection with the party is four or five decades old, Roger Ailes and other Fox News executives nonetheless quite seriously argue that their style of programming actually provides the audience with “the truth” because it acts as counterweight to the “liberal” media.
For Americans who entered politics during or after the Reagan era, this view that political “truth” can only be found by embracing one side or another of diametrically opposed partisan dichotomies seems inevitable and leads to the frequent view that Democrats have no choice but to “fight fire with fire.” For people who grew up in the 1950’s and early 60’s, on the other hand, this view is profoundly troubling.
Americans who went to school in the in 50s and 1960’s were taught that there were two fundamentally distinct modes of political life – Soviet “totalitarianism” and the “American way.” “Propaganda”, “brainwashing” and “thought-control” were three central pillars of totalitarian societies and the exact opposite of how things were done in America.

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By July 16th of last year, Fox News had run 95 different reports about the “intimidation” of voters by the New Black Panther Party, all of them featuring videotape of two individuals in front of a polling station. The intense coverage of the event not only convinced literally millions of Fox viewers that this was just the “tip of the iceberg” of a pattern of widespread voter intimidation but also provided “proof” that the Obama Justice Department had ignored a “slam-dunk case” of voter intimidation.
Despite an intense search, however, investigators could not find any voters at the precinct to assert that they had actually been intimidated. On April 23, Civil Rights Commissioner Arlen Melendez stated “no citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting at the Fairmount Avenue Polling Station in 2008.”
In today’s Washington Post Plum Line Adam Serwer describes what happened next:

“Having been unable to find any actual voters who were intimidated, [Commissioner] Adams and his colleagues settle on the witness accounts of Republican poll watchers.
The J memo (or justification memo) arguing that the case should be brought forward states that two Republican poll watchers, Larry and Angela Counts, were so intimidated by the two New Black Panther Party individuals that they were afraid to go outside, that they had their lunch brought to them as a result, and that Angela Counts had expressed the fear that someone might “bomb” the polling place.”

You can read the official transcript of what the two poll watchers testified to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission here and here.
The following are the key passages from Larry Counts testimony:
——————————-
Q. So did you actually ever see the Black Panthers?
A. No I never seen them…
—————————-
Q. Did you ever become aware – and I know I asked you this but let me run through it – did you become aware that members of the New Black Panther Party were outside?
A. No….
—————————–
Q. did anybody from the Republican Party come in and speak to you during election day?
A. No.
Q. Let me be specific. There is a tall gentleman who was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. His name is Chris Hill. Did he come in and speak to you?
A. Not that I recall, no.
Q. I’ll be explicit. If Mr. Hill is on videotape saying that he spoke to you and you indicated that you were afraid, you don’t recall any statement like that to Mr. Hill.
A. No. I had no reason to be afraid.
————————————
Q. And you never heard anybody inside the election room say that there are two members of the Black Panther Party outside?
A. No. Nobody was, you know. Communicating or talking about no Black Panthers on the inside.
——————————-
Q. Mr. Counts I only want you to refer to the photo at the bottom of the scene.
A. I ain’t never seen those two guys.
Q. OK just to be explicit so it’s in our written record, there appear to be two members of the – – I won’t even say that they are members of the New Black Panther Party — but the two gentlemen there in dark black uniforms and one of them has a nightstick. You don’t recall seeing either one of those gentlemen on election day. Is that right?
A. No…
—————–
Q. did you see any voters turned away at the polling site?
A. No.
Q. Did anybody who came in to vote indicate that they were concerned or worried about their safety?
A. No.
————————-
The account given by Angela Counts is largely similar in its lack of any testimony about “intimidation”.
The supposed “intimidation” of the Counts was a central part of the “Justification Memo” that has subsequently been used to convince vast numbers of Americans to distrust the American political system and believe in a conspiracy within the Justice Department to allow the intimidation of white voters to occur unmolested. Yet the actual testimony directly contradicts what the memo asserts.
In one important respect, however, it must be admitted that the promulgators of the “intimidation” story are entirely correct.
The actions of some people within the Justice Department are indeed appalling and terrifying.

A virtual who’s who of conservatives – from George Will and Marc Thiessen to virtually every well-known conservative media figure and blogger has now reacted with outrage to the idea that violent rhetoric by conservatives had anything to do with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Many, in fact, reverse the accusation and claim that they are the victims of a new “McCarthyism” or a “blood libel” when critics suggest that violent rhetoric by conservatives in any way contributed to the crime.
On the currently available evidence, Jared Loughner appears to be psychotic and delusional and not a typical right-wing extremist. However, it would be interesting to ask the conservative “who’s who” if they also believe that violent right-wing rhetoric had nothing to do with the following 21 attacks or thwarted attacks that left 8 innocent people dead
(list from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence)

July 27, 2008–Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it “a symbolic killing” because he really “wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book,” but was unable to gain access to them.
April 4, 2009–Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna’ stand by what his forefathers told him to do.”
May 31, 2009–Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group. In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate. Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car.
June 10, 2009–James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a “hardcore Neo-Nazi,” walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals.
June 24, 2009–Hal Turner, a New Jersey resident and white supremacist blogger/radio host, is arrested again after calling for the murder of three Republican-appointed jurists on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals who had issued a June 2 decision upholding handgun restrictions in Chicago. Writing on his blog, Turner says, “Let me be the first to say this plainly: these judges deserve to be killed,” and includes photographs, phone numbers, work addresses, and room numbers of the judges, as well as a map of Chicago’s federal courthouse which points out its “anti-truck bomb” pylons.
January 12, 2010–Mark Campano of Cuyhaoga Falls, Ohio, pleads not guilty to charges of possessing destructive devices not registered with the federal government. Law enforcement are called to Campano’s apartment in November 2009 after he accidentally detonates a pipe bomb and loses parts of two fingers. They find 30 pipe bombs, 17 rifles and handguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the dwelling. Campano’s next-door neighbor states, “He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos … He was some kind of radical, and he didn’t believe in the government.”
February 18, 2010–Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, “The law ‘requires’ a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not ‘duress’ than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is … Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
March 19-22, 2010–During consideration of health care reform legislation by the U.S. House of Representatives, vandals attack Democratic offices in Pleasant Ridge, Ohio; Wichita, Kansas; Tuscon, Arizona; Niagra Falls, New York; and Rochester, New York. Mike Vanderboegh, the former leader of f the Alabama Constitutional Militia, takes credit for the violence after posting a blog on March 19 that states, “If we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democratic party headquarters across this country, we might just make up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” Several Democratic members receive death threats, including Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who is told snipers will “kill the children of the members who voted YES”; Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who receives a message saying, “You’re dead; we know where you live; we’ll get you”; and Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO), whose staffer is told by a caller, “Better hope I don’t run into you in a dark alley with a knife, a club or a gun.” House Minority Leader John Boehner, speaking about Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH), says he “may be a dead man.”
March 29, 2010–Nine members of the MIchigan-based “Hutaree” Christian militia are arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy and attempting to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The group had allegedly plotted to kill a law enforcement officer and then detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during the officer’s funeral procession. The group targeted federal officials, members of the law enforcement “brotherhood” and other participants in the “New World Order.”
April 1-20, 2010–Walter Fitzpatrick, a member of American Grand Jury (AGJ), attempts to effect a citizen’s arrest on grand jury foreman Gary Pettway at the Monroe County courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee, and is arrested. Nineteen days later, on the day that Fitzpatrick is scheduled to face trial, Oath Keepers member Darren Huff is pulled over by Tennessee state troopers as he attempts to drive to the courthouse to arrest county officials he calls “domestic enemies of the United States engaged in treason.” Huff is armed with a Colt-45 handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle with 300-400 rounds of ammunition. He is indicted on federal charges of traveling in interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot and transporting in commerce a firearm in furtherance of a civil disorder.
July 18, 2010–California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items.”
November 3, 2010–James Patock, 66, of Pima County, Arizona, is arrested on the National Mall in the District of Columbia after law enforcement authorities find a .223 caliber rifle, a .243 caliber rifle barrel, a .22 caliber rifle, a .357 caliber pistol, several boxes of ammunition, and propane tanks wired to four car batteries in his truck and trailer. Patock former neighbor in Arizona reported that, “He hated the president. He hated everything. He said if he got a chance he would shoot the president

(Note: an alert commenter has pointed out that there is evidence that Laughtner was familiiar with various ideas of right wing groups associated with the Patriot movement See the link Here)

In the aftermath of the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other individuals many commentators have noted the sinister background of violent rhetoric that emerged after the Democratic victory of 2008. This sinister background ranges from Sharron Angle’s hints of “second amendment remedies” and Sarah Palin’s bull’s-eye rifle targets on Democratic congressional candidates to the implicit threats of violence by people carrying guns at political rallies and displaying signs extolling violent resistance to laws they oppose.
The defenders of the rhetoric of violence excuse their statements and implicit threats of violence by saying it is an understandable reaction to encroachments on their liberty since Obama’s election. Had Democrats not overreached, they argue, conservatives would not have overreacted.
This argument has no basis in fact. Violent rhetoric and literal threats of murder against Democrats, liberals and progressives have been a gradually increasing feature of American politics since the 1990’s. They are arrayed along a slippery slope of increasingly direct threats and incitement to murder.
Here are a number of clear examples from the time of the Clinton and Bush administrations, clearly predating the supposed “provocations” that right-wing conservative spokesmen are pointing to as the justification for their violent rhetoric.
1. Disturbing “Jokes” About Killing Liberals

Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we
can have two on every campus–living fossils–so we we’ll never forget what
these people stood for.”
Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Tim McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building”

2. Implied Threats:

Bill O’Reilly: “Americans who work against our military once the [Iraq] war is
underway will be considered Enemies of the State by me. Just fair warning to
you, Barbara Streisand, and others who see the world as you do. I don’t want
to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this,
well, let’s just say you will be spotlighted.”

3. Overt Threats of Violence against Liberals:

Glen Beck: “Hang on, let me just tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking
about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or
if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could.”
Eric Erickson (Redstate.com): “At what point do [people] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?”
Michael Savage: “I say round liberals up and hang em’ high. When I hear someone’s in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-25.”

4. Specific Incitements to Violence against Law Enforcement Officers

Dick Morris: “Those crazies in Montana who say ‘we’re going to kill ATF
agents because the UN’s going to take over.’ Well, they’re beginning to have
a case.”
G . Gorden Liddy (broadcasting advice on how to kill law enforcement officers): “…head-shots, they are wearing body armor, head shots… or shoot for the groin.”

It is understandable that progressives had a deeply emotional reaction to Obama’s recent press conference in which he forcefully asserted his commitment to seeking compromise and used the adjectives “sanctimonious” and “purist” to describe inflexible positions on issues like the public option and the deal on the tax cut extension. Aside from the substantive issues, his attitude itself seemed fundamentally unfair – seeming to criticize his most loyal supporters rather than his most bitter opponents and using language that seemed almost deliberately provocative. Coming after months of vicious and utterly dishonest attacks by Republicans, progressives found his words a harsh and demoralizing blow.
Yet, at the same time, Obama’s criticisms could ironically also be most helpful thing he could possibly have done to help American progressives. To understand why this might be so, it is necessary to think clearly about what roles the president and the progressive movement can most usefully play.
Last week TDS published an analysis that carefully delineated the very different political roles of activist, moral leader and legislator. As the author, political scientist Andrew Sabl noted: “all three contribute crucial things to democratic politics–but very different things, normally best performed by very different kinds of people…the same person is unlikely to be able to play more than one of these roles well…”
In one sense this seems entirely obvious but it has very important implications for current progressive strategy that have been largely ignored. In the eras of previous social movements there was a very clear separation between the role of the president and the leaders of the progressive mass movements of the time. John L. Lewis and the other organizers of the industrial trade unions in the 1930’s focused their main efforts on union organizing, not influencing congress or President Roosevelt. Martin Luther King and the other civil rights leaders devoted most of their efforts to building a powerful mass movement and relatively little time to working with John Kennedy on the crafting of the Civil Rights Act. It would quite literally never have occurred to any of the activists and organizers in either of these independent grass-roots mass movements that exerting “inside the beltway” pressure on the president should be their primary task, rather than grass-roots organizing. In the social movements of the 1930’s and 1960’s, influencing the detailed shape of legislation in Washington was considered a very — very — secondary activity.
Beginning in the 1970’s, however, independent mass movements built by grass roots organizing began to sharply decline, By the 1980’s many of the major progressive movements like the environmental movement had become more and more deeply involved in lobbying and oversight of legislation and less and less committed to grass roots organizing.
The rise of the internet and the Web in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s powerfully reinforced this trend. While the internet made fundraising, letter writing or petition campaigns much easier – allowing, for example, the development of new online organizations like MoveOn — at the same time they made face-to-face grass-roots organizing even more difficult because they undermined the progressive commitment to traditional means of struggle like demonstrations, rallies and door-to-door organizing campaigns. The explosive growth of the web strongly encouraged the belief that new online organizations could largely replace traditional real-world organizations and the notion of “the netroots” as a modern equivalent of the traditional “grassroots” became popular. The expectation grew that organizing could now be done electronically rather than face to face. The growth of giant online communities like MoveOn, Kos and others seemed proof that this was indeed feasible.
But the rapid growth of these online organizations obscured a fundamental difference between them and traditional progressive organizing: online organizing only “organizes” those people who are already convinced of progressive ideas and already committed to progressive action. Unless supplemented by traditional grass-roots organizing, online organizing cannot effectively reach out, make a connection with, convince and recruit new people who are currently indifferent to progressive issues or unaware of progressive causes. Nor can it dramatize problems and expose injustices in the way that nonviolent protests and mass demonstrations do. In a very large number of cases online communication is not only limited to “preaching to the choir” but also to “organizing the already organized.” Online organizations can efficiently raise money, collect signatures, and coordinate the actions of people already committed to an objective, but they cannot build new relationships and gradually change the attitudes of people who are not already committed to a goal. Traditional grass-roots organizing, on the other hand, can.

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On the surface, it can easily appear that there is a single, relatively unified progressive consensus that is critical of President Obama’s handling of the tax cut extension. But, in fact, within this apparent consensus there are actually two profoundly different perspectives being expressed – one by mainstream progressive Democrats critical of Obama recent actions but still basically favoring a “big tent” strategy for 2012 and the other by more radical critics whose arguments logically lead in the direction of a third party.
On the one hand, many leading Democratic strategists have expressed their objections to Obama’s recent strategy. In the last week TDS contributor Mike Lux, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel, among many others, have all clearly and passionately expressed their strong objections.
At the same time, however, all three are in agreement on several basic propositions.

1. Political compromise is often necessary. Their disagreement with Obama does not reflect a rejection of compromise in general.
2. The shared near-term goal of these critics is still to build a center-left coalition for 2012 that can re-elect Obama. The three might have disagreements about the optimal balance to aim for in the composition of this coalition between the center and the left, and also regarding the best strategies for winning both groups, but they are in agreement about the need to win at least some support from both “base” and “swing” voters.
3. They agree that Obama’s particular strategy with regard to the tax cut and his criticisms of his progressive supporters were major mistakes that weakened the struggle to achieve the shared objective. Both as economic policy and as political strategy they concur that Obama’s general approach on this particular issue was simply and profoundly wrong.

The second, quite distinct perspective derives from a broader and substantially more radical critique. It is a perspective that fundamentally rejects Obama’s basic objectives and political philosophy.
The radical critique is expressed in three main propositions – propositions that are now widely repeated in online discussions across the internet:

1. That Obama has proven himself no better than a Republican.
2. That the two major political parties are the same – hopelessly corrupt and completely dominated by Wall Street and large corporations. Any apparent superiority of the Democratic Party over the Republican Party is superficial, not fundamental.
3. that the Democratic Party must be ideologically firm and completely unified around an uncompromising progressive platform and not organized as a “big tent” coalition that contains a range of moderate to progressive supporters and views. From this perspective, regardless of the particular conditions in any given election year it is a matter of core principle that it is preferable to lose an election while running on a solidly radical-progressive program rather than to win an election running on a hopelessly diluted and compromised platform.

From these, two strategic conclusions follow:

1. Unless he radically transforms himself in the next few months, Obama should be dumped and replaced with a more consistently radical candidate for 2012
2. Disappointed Dems should either not vote for Obama (or any other Dems who do not meet core left-progressive criteria) or at least adamantly refuse to contribute or volunteer in such campaigns. Even if less than firmly progressive Dems are the winners in contested primaries, they should still be boycotted in the general election.

It is difficult to find a single discussion thread in the progressive blogosphere right now that does not contain numerous comments reflecting this package of views. Often they are expressed in a very personal way e.g. “I’m completely disgusted with the Democrats. Obama is no better than Bush, I’m staying home in 2012” or “I’ll be damned if I’ll donate a single penny of my money or single second of my time to these spineless, cowardly Dems who cave in on every single issue”
On one level it can be suspected that these statements may in many cases be an emotional outburst that does not reflect the person’s more sober opinion, but at the same time it is also necessary to be realistic and face a basic fact. The moment one substitutes the name Al Gore for that of Barack Obama, the three basic radical propositions above become the exact arguments that were put forth by the Ralph Nader campaign in 2000 and, in previous decades, by third parties like the U.S. Socialist Party (The third proposition, in fact, is actually a paraphrase of early socialist leader Eugene V. Debs famous defense of third parties — that “it is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”)
This does not mean that advocates of a third party are necessarily wrong. There is nothing inherently absurd or dishonorable in believing in the need for a third, left-wing political party or in calling for a takeover of the Democratic Party to convert it into something that would act and behave like a firmly and consistently anti-corporate left-wing third party.
But there has been a profound change in the way radical critics of the Democratic Party have expressed themselves in recent years. Before 2000, advocates of a third party would assert their “plague on both your houses” perspective proudly and openly. Since the 2000 Nader campaign catastrophically discredited the notion of a third party campaign, however, most radicals do not mention a third party directly and have almost completely shifted to arguing for transforming the Democratic Party into a radical party from within. As a result, the three propositions and two recommendations above are now invariably presented as the opinions of “disillusioned Democrats” rather than as challenges to the Democratic Party from the independent left.

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According to one major narrative of the 2010 election, the key to Democrats setbacks was the fact that they “lost the independents.” The election supposedly confirmed that these voters had rejected Obama’s agenda, become more conservative and turned to the Republicans.
In this perspective, independent voters are invariably pictured as thoughtful and cautious political moderates, fearful of excessive government and seeking a “sensible center” between Democrats and Republicans. Here is how David Brooks described them last January:

Americans, with their deep, vestigial sense of proportion, have reacted. The crucial movement came between April and June, when the president’s approval rating among independents fell by 15 percentage points and the percentage of independents who regarded him as liberal or very liberal rose by 18 points. Since then, the public has rejected any effort to centralize authority or increase the role of government.

And again in April:

As government grew, many moderates and independents…recoiled in alarm….As government has seemed more threatening, moderates and independents have also fled from the Democratic Party. Democratic favorability ratings have dropped by 21 points over the past year, from 59 percent to 38 percent.

Clearly, this is a distinct, coherent and self-aware political group being described, one that deeply fears and rejects excessively active government and which decisively turned on Obama when he went beyond their moderate political agenda.
But here’s the odd thing: in the real world of ordinary, everyday life these “independents” are completely – and I mean completely – invisible. One never sees such normal indications of political sentiment as bumper stickers or yard signs, for example. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a yard sign or bumper sticker that said something like “I’m an independent and I vote” or “proud Independent voter” or “Independent voter — and proud of it” Around election time how many slogans did you see that said “Independents for Obama”, “independents for McCain” or “Independents for such-and-so for Senator”.
None, right? Absolutely none.
And then consider this: one never actually meets people who explicitly call themselves “political independents” during casual conversations at soccer matches, PTA meetings, neighborhood zoning debates, garage sales, street fairs, church events, bake sales, holiday parties, Boy Scout trips and so on. In white, suburban neighborhoods one will frequently meet many perfectly nice middle-aged people who will define themselves politically as “moderate Republicans” or “Conservative Democrats” but one rarely meets people who describe themselves as “a moderate Independent” or “a conservative independent” or people who define themselves politically by saying things like “Me? I’m an ‘independent’ voter.”
The fact is inescapable: in the world of ordinary daily life where people actually talk to each other about politics a distinct and coherent political formation of “independent” voters simply does not exist.

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