Thomas Friedman in Tomorrowland

Revised.

Thomas Friedman doesn't like any of the candidates running for President, and with regard to the Republicans, who can blame him? Not much to like there, is there? And what are the chances the GOP would nominate anybody Friedman would vote for anyway?  This isn't an accidental collection of Right Wing goofballs and corporatist stooges. They are representative of the party today.

As for the Democrats, well, in the social and professional circles of the Very Serious People Friedman never leaves except when getting into taxis driven by magic cabbies with insight into the way this flat world works that only coincidentally mirrors Friedman's own thinking, disliking Hillary Clinton is a matter of good form and as required to be taken seriously among the serious people as believing that relatively modest liberal positions that polls show are the positions a majority of Americans hold are "hard left" and as extreme as any held by the actually radical right.  The accompanying belief among the serious people is that there is such a political entity as a centrist who combines the best of the not at all far left and the not too far right with none of the passion or conviction of either side, which is---here’s a shock---the kind of candidate Friedman is looking for to like.

Friedman’s complaint is that none of the people running for President “surprises” him “with any daring.”

I guess what he means is that none of them are offering what he would think of as big, bold, new ideas that will carry this great nation into the future. He wants someone capable of the kind of big, bold thinking that results from having no particular principles except for a vague and bloodless faith that people like Thomas Friedman know what's best for the country and if those Friedman-esque people have an idea it must be a good one.

Democrats are now polarizing toward the populist left. Since the Republicans have already purged their moderates, this trend does not bode well for the country. It means that the hybrid/centrist blends that on many issues can create the most resilient solutions are “off the table.

What is he talking about? When did that ever happen?

What great thing in this country's history, what "resilient solution", from the Revolution through abolition through women winning the right to vote through the New Deal through the Civil Rights movement and through on up to the brink of marriage equality, wasn't accomplished by a group of liberal extremists dragging people from the center to join them in opposing the entrenched conservative interests of the day?

Or put another way, what did hybrid/centrists ever manage to accomplish with their blending?

Winning the Cold War?

The National Highway system?

National Parks?

Actually the National Parks are a very liberal idea and were despised by the corporatist right and still are. Theodore Roosevelt was hated for what he did mostly by acting in defiance of a conservative Congress to expand the park system.

The highway system had conservative opposition too.

As for the Cold War, we won, all right, but it took over forty years and nearly bankrupted us financially and morally and spiritually, and it’s not so much the case that we defeated the Soviets as we outlasted them, so I’m not sure we should count it as a great victory for the centrist hybrids. We can confidently assume that if the Right had been in charge we’d have had World War III and if liberals had been running things we’d have gotten out of Vietnam sooner and might not have gone in at all. Kennedy and Johnson weren’t acting as liberals or for liberals in Southeast Asia. They were in fact acting as centrist hybrids. The daring centrist hybrid idea leading to a resilient solution of the Cold War, embraced by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, was propping up Right Wing dictatorships.

Maybe Friedman's thinking of the Civil Rights Act. If so, he's making the mistake that defines the political thinking of too many insider journalists like him, that bipartisanship is a good in and of itself that naturally produces good results and that it is simply a matter of two sides putting aside their minor differences for the sake of a larger and broadly agreed upon good and this isn't what happened. There was no hybrid blending. What happened is that people Friedman would regard as hard left today dragged people of good will to the left,  in the process forcing many of them who had thought of themselves as conservative to realize that they were actually liberals. It also caused a lot of people who thought of themselves as conservative to realize they were in fact hardline Right Wingers. The result wasn't a national consensus but increased polarization and significant divisions that persist to this day and an almost immediate realignment of the ranks of voters within the two parties that moved one a bit more to the left and the other a lot farther to the right.

In other words, one of the greatest things we did as a country was brought about by passionate liberals not bloodless centrists and resulted in the present political realities Friedman laments.

But that aside, what sorts of things would Friedman like to see a coalition of centrist hybrids accomplish? 

The defeat by House Democrats — with an assist from hard-right House Republicans and praise from Hillary Clinton — of President Obama’s sensible plan to expand Pacific free trade and pair it with worker and environmental protections was a bad sign…

Yep. TPP and TAA.

There’s a daring new idea.

Reminds me. The centrist hybrids loved NAFTA too and what a “resilient solution” that turned out to be.

And of course there’s this:

…phased-in entitlement trims and means-testing to Social Security and Medicare…

The centrist hybrids love this one. At least he doesn’t call it “entitlement reform”, the elitist journalists’ preferred euphemism  for Work until you drop and don’t get sick.

Beyond TPP and TAA and cuts to Social Security and Medicare---Sorry. “Entitlement trims”.---it's a laundry list of pragmatic policies that Democrats have been trying to effect for years and Republicans have fought tooth and nail and mostly succeeded in thwarting.

If Freidman wants done what he says needs to be done on infrastructure, clean energy, student debt, and health care,then the smart thing to do is vote Democratic no matter how much you dislike the Democrat at the top of the ticket. But Friedman can't admit this because it would upset his friends and dinner companions among the serious people. So he retreats to the accepted fallback position: "Both Sides!"

Democrats want to do a good thing.

Republicans prevent them from doing it.

Both sides are at fault.

But let's grant Friedman his wishful thinking and pretend for the moment that there are great daring ideas we only need a serious minded centrist hybrid visionary leader to surprise us with.

That person isn't running. That's Friedman's complaint. So what is going to happen? Somebody who is running will become President and then what?

What will that somebody do as President, beside not dare to surprise us on the path to the future Friedman dreams of?

Easy enough to answer.

If the next President is a Republican he will do what all the Republicans running are promising to do and Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have been doing: work to destroy every single social and economic good achieved over the last hundred years, including whichever ones Friedman thinks were achieved by centrist hybrids.

And what will a Democratic President do?

Try to stop them and repair the damage they've already done.

It doesn't matter what some idealized candidate might do to take us into a hazily idealized future. It matters what the real candidates intend to do once in office, given the political realities of the here and now.

That Friedman doesn't deign to take those realities into consideration doesn't mark him as any sort of daring and surprising visionary pointing the way to a glorious Tomorrowland.

It reveals him as just another smug, self-satisfied, self-infatuated elitist protected from the vicissitudes of the here and now by his wealth and privileges afford by his status as a celebrity journalist who doesn't give a damn what happens to the rest of us stuck living in the present.

___________________________________________

No, I’m sorry, I did not read Friedman’s op-ed so you don’t have to. You’ll have to read it for yourself. Here it is: My Choice for President? None of the Above.

Note on the revision: My original version of this post included a paragraph about some Republicans’ reactions to the shootings in Charleston. I took it out because I decided it was both too little and too much and because the discovery of the killer’s white supremacist website and racist manifesto is churning things up in a hurry and I didn’t think it was, to use my own phrasing against me, reflecting the “political realities of the here and now.” But that explains SReady’s comment and my reply.

Comments

[Fiddlin Bill]

You are totally right (not surprisingly!). I would add that any argument which yields the conclusion "so, don't vote at all," or "vote for some 3rd party candidate" will most like mean, in reality, that the candidate you like least will have a better chance of winning. See, e.g., G W Bush, Florida, 2000. It was the votes for Ralph Nader that made it "close enough," a term of electoral art which masks all the shenanigans that occur inside the process, every time. So all those Nader voters really showed Bill Clinton a thing or two, huh?

[SReady]

The "Stars & Bars" (the flag of the CSA govt) are not flown by the Capitol in SC. They fly the Confederate battle flag on the Capitol grounds. The distinction is important. While either would be egregious, to fly the battle flag is to fly the flag of that indicates those who stand with it & behind it are actively engaging in war. By flying it or standing with it one declares oneself to be some combination of ignorant, inarticulate and actively bellicose.

[Lance Mannion]

SReady, I've always been confused about that. I've been corrected both ways before. But your point about what it stands for whatever it's called is a very good one.

Btw, I took out that paragraph before I saw your comment because I decided I was trolling myself in a way by introducing a much bigger issue that I should deal with in a post of its own into what's essentially a routine bit of pundit bashing on my part.

[Chris the cop]

"Or put another way, what did hybrid/centrists ever manage to accomplish with their blending?
Winning the Cold War?
The National Highway system?
National Parks?"

Actually 2 of the 3 did occur because of centrists. The Cold War was won by the long term deployment of the Kennan Doctrine of containment, the middle ground between capitulation to a mass murderer (that would be Stalin) and the dictators that followed, and nuking everything red. And this notion that the Cold War "bankrupted us financially and morally and spiritually" is just silly. Or were the 90s a time of national bankruptcy that somehow got by me?
The highway system was pushed through under a moderate centrist Republican (that would be Eisenhower, who was its major champion)
The National Parks? Don't enough about that to speak intelligently.
And as for the Civil Rights Act, thank goodness there were enough Republicans around since more of them voted for it then the plurality of racist Democrats who were in office back then. A win for liberalism for sure, but hardly accomplished soley by liberals.

It's the same old bilge, Lance: left = good, right = bad. The thing is, it IS both sides fault. Both sides are made up largely of horses asses. And both sides are going to have to try much, much harder to find common ground. Which they won't since they are made up largely of horses asses. I can't think of a period in my adult life when I was as disgusted with both sides of the aisle as I am now.

[Barbara]

You do know that Friedman isn't just a celebrity journalist, don't you? He is married into an extremely, extremely wealthy family (easily googleable). At this point, writing must be more of a hobby for him, because he certainly doesn't need the money.

I mention this to underline that he is indeed a smug, self-satisfied, self-infatuated elitist protected from the vicissitudes of the here and now by his wealth and privileges who doesn't give a damn what happens to the rest of us stuck living in the present.

[Paul Loop]

Chris the Cop> You missed the point. He said ``What great thing in this country's history ... wasn't accomplished by a group of liberal extremists dragging people from the center to join them in opposing the entrenched conservative interests of the day?''
If you can prove that it was centrists who dragged liberals to build highways you might have a point.
The Cold War? The Cold War was a colossal drain on the nation's treasury, and this word ``containment'' that you blithely toss off, was the activating strategy behind the disastrous, expensive, bloody, demoralizing, divisive and ultimately pointless expansion and prosecution of the Viet Nam War. The Cold War wasn't just pointing missiles at each other and making threats. Would that it had been. And somehow you managed to slip right past the '80s and the monumental deficits Reagan ran up amping defense spending to pressure the already failing USSR (which had put Stalin in the ground in 1953) while slashing taxes. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, so the Cold War was, you know, sort of OVER before the '90s got started. Remember the ``peace dividend?''But nice try for the both sides argument.

And as for your point about Civil Rights: Yes, moderate Republican votes offset the racist Democrats in office back then, but liberals put the Civil Rights Act on the table. Period. Eisenhower couldn't get his party to back civil rights reform in the '50s. LBJ -- a war hawk but a social liberal to the nth degree -- is the one who cajoled, threatened and twisted enough arms to get the centrists and enough of the Dixiecrats themselves to come around. The GOP House and Senate voters from the old Confederate states? NONE of them voted for the Civil Rights Act. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights . Those same racist Democrats -- who in spirit were not at all ``left,'' and who in fact rose to power in reaction to the liberal Republican who vanquished the Confederacy -- couldn't wait to jump to the Republican Party and invert what had been the Democratic Party's southern strategy (though few Democrats like to hear it put that way today) into their own, infinitely worse manifestation.
So, yeah, right = bad, even when the right dresses up as Democrats. And the reason both sides can't find common ground today is 100% on their doorstep.

[Chris the cop]

We'll have to agree to disagree here. Yes, Vietnam was a disaster, but containment saved the world, keeping the Soviet Union in check until it exhausted itself. The interstate highway was not created by "a group of liberal extremists dragging people from the center;" and agreeing that "right = bad" is just as silly as saying "left is bad." The percentage of people who are Democrats (not necessarily liberal) is about the same as the percentage of people who are Republicans (not necessarily conservative.) - about 45%. Are you really going to blithely dismiss nearly have the registered voters in the US as 'bad' just because they don't agree with you?

And as far as the Cold War being "a colossal drain on the nation's treasury," it only took place during huge amounts of economic growth and never remotely approached the level of (proportional)debt we have today: $17 trillion and counting.