Kevin Drum has an interesting post that helps me to understand the reaction of a lot of commenters to a post I put up at Donklephant last June. I was amazed at how many people, particularly Libertarian types, think of the greatest threat to American society coming from the left. "What world are they living in?" was the only thought that came to mind.
There is this strong sentiment among many people who think of themselves as moderates or centrists that their position splits the difference between the extremists of both the left and the right. These are the kind of people who now find Giuliani's candidacy attractive. In theory that might make some sense, but in practice since there is no left that has any political legitimacy at the moment, these moderates have their so-called center defined for them by the right. Anybody who thinks that Giuliani is a moderate because of his positions on some social issues fails to appreciate how this guy, if elected, will further promote the right's authoritarian agenda.
The right currently defines the terms of our political discourse. What the media defines as left is really centrist. As I argued in the Donklephant post and time and again in this blog, the Liberals in the New Deal tradition are the real conservatives. To think of them as "left" is to have been intellectually coopted by the right-wing flim flam.
Think about it. Where does the left in fact have its hands on the levers of power in this country? Where is there a concrete, credible threat that they might get their hands on those levers? Why is a right-wing crazy like Ann Coulter all over the MSM airwaves and a serious, credible lefty like Noam Chomsky invisible? Where is there any presence of the serious left in the media? What do most people in America know about the serious, intellectually credible critique of the left of our current poltical and economic arrangements? Are you going to get it on CNN or any of the major networks? (Olberman is a common-sense true centrist.) Most Americans know nothing except the cariactures of it by the right-leaning corporate media. There are only absurd caricatures that date back to this now irrelevant memory of the silliness of some extremists from thirty years ago.
It's astonishing to me that after what we went through in the 90s that anyone could think of the real threat as coming from the left and not the right. The extremist left in the country is, for better or worse, an impotent, virtually irrelevant political force. And whatever threat a Jacobin-style left might pose at some future date, the concrete threat now comes from the right.
Drum elaborates on this point in a post he puts up trying to understand Joe Klein's thinking that the political left is such a threat:
So what's gong on? The biggest clue is that the first example of lefty extremism that comes to Klein's mind is an issue that's been all but dead for over a decade, while his examples of righty extremism are alive and well right now today. And socialists? There have never been many socialists in America, but there were at least a few who pretended to be in the 60s and 70s, when Klein and his generation first became politically active. But today? Outside of Berkeley, you'd have to swing several hundred dead cats before you'd be likely to come across an actual socialist.
Still, since I became politically aware during the 70s and early 80s (a decade later than Klein), I have at least a little bit of appreciation for what's driving him. For somebody with a moderate temperament, some of the excesses of that era are bound to leave scars. In my case, though, I was only aware during that period, not active. Like most lefty bloggers, I only started following politics in a serious way in the late 90s. So for me the ghosts of school busing are just that: ghosts.
My political frame of reference is different. It's Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America; it's the insane wingnut scandal-mongering of the Clinton administration, culminating in Kenneth Starr and the Republican loonies trying to impeach a president over a blow job; it's the press beating up on Al Gore in 2000 and a conservative Supreme Court then awarding the disputed election to its favored candidate; it's a series of brazen, multi-trillion dollar tax cuts aimed at the GOP's rich donor class; it's the K Street Project; it's the 30-year stagnation of middle class wages, partly due to an unholy alliance between conservatives and neoliberals on trade and unions; it's a disastrous war in Iraq led by a president who had no clue what he was getting into (and still doesn't); and during this entire time a Democratic Party seemingly adrift and unwilling to really fight back.
Now, I sort of get the fact that, having grown up and reported on politics during the 60s and 70s, Klein still gets twitchy when he sees things that remind him of it. And his personal knowledge of the past has some pretty obvious utility, especially for a blogosphere that tends to be pretty historically myopic. But in the face of everything that's happened since 1994, does he really think his memories of school busing are germane?
This is where a genuine, non-snarky conversation might actually be interesting. Basically, I (and most of the liberal blogosphere, I assume) think that Klein is living in the past. He just hasn't completely internalized the vast changes of the past decade: namely that right-wing extremism is now light years more dangerous than any chimerical revival of the New Left. With apologies to Bernie Sanders, there aren't any socialists left in national politics, and a spotty dedication to national healthcare is about the most radical position held among mainstream liberals today.
This living in the memory of the sixties and seventies has almost nothing to do with our current political reality. It's time to wake up to where the real threat lies.