The coming end of my liberalism. Wish I could predict the same for the President’s.

A proud old commie taught me that the real enemies of the Left are Liberals.

Lefties want to make the world all over new.

The Right, the old commie said, breaks things, refuses to fix what’s broken, makes things that worked not work, screws it all up to the point that the People learn to hate the system.

That's where the Left is all set to step in to make things all over new.

But Liberals like the system and they have a bad habit of trying to save it.  Liberals fix things and make the People think the system works again.

This is why it might seem that a lot of Lefties in the blogosphere either hate Barack Obama or are looking for excuses to hate him.

President Obama is a Liberal.

Please.

Don’t bother with the “He’s a really a Republican in disguise” complaint.

That just makes me think you’re a Lefty looking for that excuse.

Or tell me what Republican would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

What Republican would have saved the auto industry?

What Republican would be trying to get through even the woefully inadequate health care bill we still may not get even thought it’s so weak?

Teddy Roosevelt’s dead.

Obama’s a Liberal.  And like a good Liberal he’s basically conservative.  He likes the system.  He believes that when run right and kept in repair it works.

And why wouldn’t he believe it?

Look at how well it has worked for him!

Liberals like the system and all they want more out of it is to give more people the opportunity to reap its benefits.

The President’s goal is to fix the system.

So, to put it simply, if he succeeds---a big IF, and by succeed I mean that the economy recovers, health care reform passes, and enough people are happy about it and start liking the system again, the Left will not get to tell people how make the world all over new.

I am a Liberal.

But I’m less Liberal than I used to be.

I feel myself moving Left.

When the system worked it did what Liberals like me wanted it to do.  It opened up opportunities, it spread the wealth, it gave a leg up to those who needed it, it built things.

It seemed worth fixing when and where it broke down.

It’s been a long, long time since the system worked the way it was supposed to, and it’s looking as though it will not work that way again.

Ronald Reagan and thirty years of Right Wing rule have broke it but good.

Possibly beyond repair.

Definitely beyond repair if the Right Wing, which includes and is run by the Corporate Elitists, continue to wield the power they wield.

The Tea Partiers will get bought off and co-opted the same as the Religious Right.

It’s probably even wrong to say the system’s broken.

The system’s been replaced.

What we have now is a system run by corporate elitists who regard the rest of us as the enemy.

When they don’t regard us as targets.

The system has been turned against us.  The object isn’t to provide jobs and opportunities.  Those cost too much.  The object is to wring every last nickel out of us it can.

But the President has been reluctant to acknowledge this.

Sometimes he seems to be deliberately not noticing, as if he’s averting his eyes.

Yesterday he talked about the fat cats.

But will he see fat cats in the room when he meets with “business leaders”?

I doubt it.  He will probably “see” a group of well-meaning men and women who like the system---the old system as it appealed to Liberals---and want to see it fixed.

He will see people like his friends and advisors, people who have benefited from the system---the old system---and want to see other people have the opportunity to benefit from it too.

Forget Matt Taibbi’s “They’re all in on it together!”

This isn’t corruption in the usual sense.

It’s corruption by good intentions.

The President is surrounded by very smart, very successful, very talented people who benefited from the old system, none of whom, as far as we’ve heard, has noticed that the old system is broken to the point of being irreparable.

They are all in agreement that the system needs to be fixed and that it can be fixed.

So they spend their time coming up with plans to fix it.

Which means they spend their time talking about policy and throwing around numbers.

They don’t talk about what’s happening out here, to the rest of us for whom the system has not only ceased to work but on whom it has turned.

We know who our enemies are.

The people the Obama Administration is trying to enlist in the cause of fixing the system.

Our enemies now appear to be the President’s friends.

The President thinks these “friends” want to help him fix things or that they can be persuaded to help.  He’s convinced he needs their help.  So he puts a lot of time and energy into trying to persuade them.  That’s the way Liberals work.  They bring people with an interest in fixing things together and figure out how to get them to cooperate on going about it.

The banking and finance industry is one part of the system that this old Liberal doesn’t want to see fixed.

I want it torn out like an old sink and completely replaced.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has been treating it as though it’s a load bearing wall.

It hasn’t sunk in that these people don’t want to fix things.

But while they command his attention it looks as though they matter to him a lot more than we do.

It’s discouraging.

Nobody in Washington with any power seems to be on our side.

It’s making people angry.

I don’t know if many Lefties are thinking this is a good thing, that if enough people get mad enough, they will join together to ask the Left to tell them how to make the world all over new.

The trouble is that most people are Liberals---in the sense that they liked the old system.  What I suspect they want is they want back the system as it was.

But if that system is broken beyond repair, all that President Obama is going to prove is that the Democrats can’t help us.

But I don’t expect that people will then turn to the Left.

So it seems as though are only hope is that the President does.

That he stops being a Liberal.

Comments

[fasteddie]

I'm feeling the same way - It took fear of a bolshevik revolution to create the new deal and riots to create the great society. FDR said that people had to "make me do it". The tea-partiers get out and march - but they're just glorified klansmen. It is sad that we need rioting to get real change, but there it is.

[Rana]

I think we are doomed, to a combination of frustrated anger without clear targets and increasing apathy. We're not unified enough to direct those energies and frustrations into useful directions, except on the small, local level. I see increased splintering, as people hunker in and try to protect their immediate interests, and withdrawal from the various larger systems - political, economic - to the degree that they can.

[KLG]

One of the few heroes I ever had said that proper politics should be practiced on the "left wing of the possible." Before the Reagan-Bush Descendancy (including the Clinton-Gore Interregnum) that was possible. No more. We have only two right wings in Washington and both are peopled by time-serving puddknockers of the worst sort, President Obama included. Pity.

[Chris Clarke]

Or tell me what Republican would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

What Republican would have saved the auto industry?

What Republican would be trying to get through even the woefully inadequate health care bill we still may not get even thought it’s so weak?

Nixon.

Great post despite the quibbling.

[Formerly Apostate]

Welcome, brother. I think I became a leftist some time last year - I'm now an actual communist, much to my astonishment.

I still retain an affection for the term "liberal." I don't apply it to Obama - and see him as a conservative - because he really isn't a liberal. He is not a *present-day* Republican but that is only because the Republicans have taken all leave of their senses - now we have sane Republicans (Dems) and insane Republicans (GOP). The GOP is radical, not conservative - they don't want to keep things the way they are, they want to make them worse. The Dems want to keep things as they are - that makes them conservative. They are no longer concerned with making things better - they've come to the end of history and are incapable of seeing everything that has gone wrong. The Right's propaganda as to free markets and the virtues of war took in too many liberals to leave them much right to that label.

The truth of the matter is that Obama is to the right of Richard Nixon. That's not a liberal in my book. Paul Krugman is a liberal. Compare his positions to those of Obama and you'll see why I refuse to call Obama a liberal.

You are right about the hope (delusion) that the system can be fixed and made to work for the ordinary person. That's exactly what some well-meaning "moderates" think can happen (Obama is at best a "moderate" - he admires Reagan, remember, not FDR).

[Victoria]

Yes, I've been feeling equal parts sad and nauseous about this state of affairs. There have been so many books these past eight years saying the system is broken. Teddy Kennedy even wrote one. If these long and largely ineffectual wars plus the financial meltdown were not enough to warrant radical changes, then what will it take? It's gotten to the point where I can hardly watch the madness.

[Greg]

Damnit. Lance, I hope to God you're wrong. You're very, very smart. And I hope, and pray, that you're wrong.
And that God exists.

[Sawyer, T.]

That's not you moving left, Lance.
That's the system moving right.

[Lance]

T, either way, I'm not a happy camper.

Greg, thanks, and I'm wrong a lot, so maybe there's hope.

Chris,

You're right about Nixon, who actually proposed a health care bill a lot like what we're going to get. So I should have added "So is Richard Nixon" after "Teddy Roosevelt is dead."

Formerly, as Chris points out, Nixon had some liberal tendencies, but he was NOT a liberal any more than FDR was a conservative because he had some conservative tendencies. Nixon also had to deal with a Congress and Senate that were overwhelmingly Democratic and that forced him to move left, the same way Republican majorities forced Clinton to move right, just to get some things done they wanted and put the brakes on other things they were against. Obama has to deal with a conservative majority in the Senate---all the Republicans and the Blue Dogs.

Liberalism is an approach to governing, anyway, not a set of specific policies or ideological positions.

[Shawn McDonald]

When you look to the middle and only see extremism...

...And when you look to your Left (or your Right) and see no one...

...then YOU are the Fringe.

If you don't understand that the CONSERVE in "conservatism" means "to resist changes in values" and the PROGRESS in "progressivism" means "to force changes in values (ostensibly in the name of progress)," then we're no longer even speaking the same language, much less living in the same reality.

Wow.

Just wow.

In this country we're all entitled to define ourselves, even when we are delusional. But Lance... really man... What's stopping you from just self-identifying as a Socialist? Just the stigma? The old world waft of pejorative?

Let your freak flag fly, Brother.

[J.]

Great observations, Lance. I confess to some confusion over the idea that Liberals are to the right of Lefties. It requires a slightly different set of definitions to grok that concept. No question that Obama, his (relatively newer) staff, and his Clintonite Cabinet and staff are solidly in the center and to the right of many of us. I think they lean right, enough to pal around with moderate Repubs (a species which unfortunately died out in 2007 from the lack of oxygen in their Party).

But perhaps you clarified the issue in your comment there - liberalism being a form of governing rather than a position. Good stuff, sir.

[Lance]

Shawn, what's stopping me from calling myself a socialist is that I'm not one---not yet, anyway---except in the eyes of someone looking from way over on the Right's fringe. Which is where most Republicans are standing these days.

And I know what a conservative is supposed to stand for, which is why I call Liberals conservatives.

The people who call themselves conservatives aren't. They don't want to conserve, they want to undo and go backwards, to a more authoritarian, fare less libertarian (except on the matter of guns), more intolerant time that they imagine was a golden age. Going backward is not an American value. And it's not conservative, it's reactionary.

J., Thanks. I'm working on a response. Please, stay tuned.

[actor212]

Offered as rebuttal

[Ian Welsh]

FDR was that definition of liberal, Obama isn't, because he isn't doing what is necessary to save the system. Liberalism also had a number of policy planks, and he doesn't understand them.

FDR tried to convince those who disagreed with him. If they remained instrangient (bankers) he just said "ok then, we'll do this the hard way". When Obama shows some ability to do things the hard way, he'll be fit to shine FDR's shoes. And no, FDR did not always wait for lefties to "make him do it". He did sometimes, but far, far from always.

[actor212]

FDR also had the cover of a popular and necessary war to work a lot of his more liberal tricks. He could rightly claim he was doing things like the WPA for national defense.