So here's where another ADHD confluence of ideas happened as I was reading Dean Baker's essay "Loser Liberalism versus Power Populism" and then listening to a podcast of Thom Hartmann Show from May 7th with guests David Korten (When Corporations rule the World, The Great Turning), Francis Moore Lappe (Democracy's Edge, Getting the Grip) and Tom Hayden (Ending the War in Iraq). Hayden and the others were attending the Praxis Peace Conference (From Empire to Global Community) in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He has been working on an idea and a frame about Machiavellians and Social Movements. He uses an "M" frame.
Social movements, he says, start on the Margins like the anti-Iraq War movement. Only a few people spoke out after 9/11 and some like Bill Maher were fired. But the communities of Meaning start forming. As they grow they become a movement and then they finally become the Majority that we are seeing now. When they achieve their goals, they then mostly disperse. Within social movements there are the radicals, for which there is never enough reform, and there is the rest of the movement that wants to achieve a reasonable goal. With Iraq, it would be to pull out the troops rather than end all wars for all time.
At the same time we have the Machiavellians i.e. those in control of the power structures of government, finance, religion, etc. They too break into two groups, one more radical than the other. In the case of the Iraq war, the James Baker Machiavellians will advocate a pull back of the troops to break the power of the anti-war movement that could lead to a revolution against their economic empire. The radicals represented by Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, say "Screw the people's movement, it's not enough to control Iraq, we've got to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
Anyway that's how Hayden sees social movements that have done great good for our country. The People’s Party also called the Populists called for an eight hour day and the federalizing of railroads and direct elections of Senators. The Labor Movement gave us vacations. The anti-Vietnam War ended that war. But the energies of each movement will by and large disperse after a perceived victory. And the beat goes on.
This is where Francis Moore Lappe and David Korten come in. They are the optimists as opposed to Hayden who is somewhat of a doomist. Korten calls the next movement the move towards the "Earth Community" and Lappe calls it "Living Communities". The huge demonstrations at the G8 Conference last week are indications that the next big movement will be towards ending the reign of the oligarchs who are a minority in the world but who control 52% of the world's assets. The young people of Europe are demonstrating against the wealthy buying up the assets of European Countries while we here are sitting on our butts.
So where does Dean Baker fit in to this? He has an essay worth reading called "Loser Liberalism versus Power Populism".
http://www.truthout.org/...
But there are two very distinct ways in which Democrats see themselves as helping out the middle class and poor. On the one hand, much of the Democratic Party leadership portrays the government as sort of a collective charity. These Democrats draw a picture that has the market determining societies' winners and losers. But, because they are nice people, they think it's appropriate to tax the winners to help out the losers. This distinguishes them from the Republicans, who want to tell the losers to get lost. This philosophy can be thought of as "loser liberalism," since it holds that the government must tax back some of the winners' money to help out those who did not do very well on their own.
This view can be contrasted with "power populism," which doesn't accept the basic government/market distinction that loser liberalism treats as its starting point. The power populists see government policy as determining who wins and loses in the market place. For example, it is government policy that makes it easy to import cars and clothes, thereby putting autoworkers and apparel workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This trade policy makes manufacturing workers losers.
Baker says that government policy makes winners out of doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals while making losers out of janitors, dishwashers and manufacturing workers. The game is rigged.
I like the Baker frame. It goes right to both the lizard and the logic parts of my brain and shows just how screwed up our system has become when the "loser liberals" don’t seem that much different than the old Eisenhower country club Republicans. That’s because, Baker says, loser liberalism is the dominating voice in the Democratic Party because "these folks have all the money".
Because it is the "predominant strain", it does not allow for serious debate of the policies that keep our system anything but free. In England they have a modest tax on stock trades and other financial transactions that could raise $100 Billion a year, enough to pay for universal healthcare. We have no serious debate about patent-financed research for prescription drugs "no matter how many Vioxx-type scandals fill the newspapers."
In an article on John Edwards on Sunday, Matt Bai used the terms "redistribution" folks and "pre-distribution" folks. That seemed roughly the same to me as Baker’s more colorful terms. So do we stick with basic trickle-down or do we get serious about joining the worldwide anti global movement that we saw in the streets of Berlin last week at the G8? Can we push this debate here in the U.S? Or will we be unable to do that until we have real free elections in the form of publicly financed ones?
Calls to change our story and calls to be patriotic about something other than war are needed again. Hayden said that FDR and JFK were examples of Machiavellians that became kinder and gentler once they were in office and worked with the movements to create change. Can we push our modern day Machiavellians and force them to take us back from the brink?
While the idea of putting on a French beret, crisscrossing my chest with bullets and living in the woods fighting in the resistance has its appeal to my romantic side, my practical side says that a peaceful revolution would be preferred. (Having just watched "Pan’s Labyrinth", the living in the woods deal worked for the Resistance in Spain, but I’m not sure how long we could last out here in Montana. There aren’t enough trees.)
Hayden, Lappe and Korten all think that the changes are and will continue to happen at the local level as the community movement grows. The push for public financing is making headway. The push to get rid of the Electoral College has happened in 11 state legislatures. State Democratic Parties are being taken over by progressives in some states. Challenges to incumbents are growing. Lappe talks about going to a meeting in the 1980's of a little farmer's cooperative in Wisconsin. They had started an organic milk cooperative. At the time she thought, "How sweet. How idealistic." Well now its really big and you can buy that milk all over the country. It's called "Organic Valley". The town of Powell, Wyoming saved its mercantile store by selling shares and staved off the invasion of a Wal-Mart. She has many many examples in her book. Laura Flanders has a lot of success stories in "Blue Grit".
These are the communities of meaning at the edges of our thin democracy. While other nations over the last century have fallen under the spell of tyrants, the United States has pulled back from the brink through the strength of its various citizens’ movements. Each time that our basic liberty of the right to succeed has been driven back by the gospel of greed, the people have pushed back by exposing injustice and demanding reform. The people time and again have lived up to the faith that Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine put in them. The radical concept that the masses could govern well has been borne out again and again. And I want to believe we are up to the task.
But our media has failed us as watchdogs and so we must take up that task as well. We must take up the challenge of the lawyer and muckraking journalist Henry Demerest Lloyd when he said, "The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children." And we must rise to RFK’s challenge to redefine ourselves not in terms of gross national product, but by the quality of life that is available to all its citizens.
Is it time for the power populists to unite and throw out the bums? Or should we stick with the status quo and try some more loser liberalism? Is it time to push back or wait for sunnier times? For me, it's time to reclaim our freedom. It's time to fight. Netroots get to your keyboards and grassroots infilitrate, infiltrate, infiltrate. If not to the barricades, then to the bars and cafes. We must hone our skills and be ready. We must build the white horse and then stick somebody on it.
Further reading: Tom Hayden calling for getting out of Iraq and responding to Lakshmi Chaudhry's "Rethinking Iraq" back in January 2005 is worth reading again. It is a rebuttal of the "fear of the embassy roof" from Vietnam thinking that I hear a lot of. At the end of the piece is a link to the Jonathan Schell rebuttal as well. Two Years have gone by since they called for getting out of Iraq with some sort of plan.
http://www.alternet.org/...