There's been a lot written the last week that correctly asks the question: Why is the Progressive Caucus in the House considered obstructionist and the Blue Dogs not? Four out of the five committees in congress delivered a bill with the public option, and one, which hasn't gotten around to delivering anything, apparently will not have a public option, and is rumored to be weakening other important provisions, yet that committee's work is the only one that counts in Beltway think.
Why do the Blue Dogs in Senate Finance get to call the shots here? Is it because they better represent the will of the American people? No, because polling shows that the American people strongly supports the public option. Is it because they are more reasonable? But they have no real reasons for rejecting the public option except to say that it will not get the votes, but it's their votes that are needed. So why are they so central to fortunes of this bill? Why are they allowed to obstruct the will of majority in their party and of the majority of the American electorate?
Is it because the Blue Dogs are the bridge to the Republicans? Well that's a bridge to nowhere. The Republicans are not a dominant force on either end of Pennsylvania Ave., and the party was soundly rejected in the past two election cycles. And yet the Republican mindset still dominates the Beltway mind. This seems to be the crux. It doesn't matter what majorities think; it only matters what powerful insider minorities think, and the Republicans and the Blue Dogs' power is linked to their alignment with those powerful minorities. Blue Dogs and DLC Democrats for the most part have gone native in a world dominated by those minority interests and now differ from the Republicans not in kind but in degree, in style but not in substance.
That, at least, would be the Nader/Chomsky critique, and it explains a lot, but I don't know if I buy into it, at least not as a complete explanation. There are good people in Congress, and I still believe that Obama, whatever his failings so far, is someone who wants to serve the American people and not K-Street. Whether he has the capability, I don't know yet, but I haven't given up hope. The good people in politics are up against a corrupted political culture that people, elected and unelected, whose careers depend on navigating in that culture, just take for granted as normal reality. The people who thrive in this culture, the media types, the lobbyists, the elected officials, and their staffers as a group are not particularly thoughtful or principled.
That's not a criticism, just an observation. Few people anywhere are in the habit of being thoughtful and principled; they go with the prevailing flow, and don't want to rock any boats. Beltway types are like most people in that respect. Like most ambitious Americans, whether in politics or business, the people who thrive in Beltway culture are not big-picture types; they care primarily about themselves and their next career move. Their success depends on impressing or pleasing the people who have the power to advance their career, who in turn owe their careers to others who pass on whatever acceptable norms they learned from those who preceded them, and so everything depends on how normal reality gets defined and gets passed on to those who enter the Beltway cultural bubble.
So in the '50s and '60s that culture was dominated by the New Deal consensus. Even Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon went with the flow and didn't try to fight against its fundamental assumptions. They differed from Democrats not in kind, but in degree. The New Deal was 'settled law', so to speak. People who wanted to advance their careers accepted the world that came into being during the FDR era as normal reality, and they were acculturated into its values. Were there abuses? Of course. But we were better off.
That changed when movement conservatism, which never accepted the New Deal as normative or settled law, finally got their man in the oval office in 1980. The movement's goal was to dismantle the New Deal consensus, and insofar as we now think of Reagan's as a transformative presidency, they succeeded, even if the movement did not achieve its most cherished goal, which was to shrink the government.
Whatever the conscious intent of principled conservatives who backed the Reagan Revolution, the unintended consequences were the weakening of government's role in maintaining fairness and equality. Wealth stratification favoring the already rich and powerful was the result. Read Kevin Phillips for the details. So movement conservatives succeeded in reducing the influence and prestige of New Deal system and mindset, but not the size of government. Rather government grew to meet the needs of a reinvigorated Robber Baronesque cronyism dominated by the legislative agenda of K-Street.
And it is this cronyism, brought to us by the Republicans of the last thirty years, to which among all Democrats, the Blue Dogs and DLC Democrats are best adapted, and since that's where the real power is, that's why the gang of six which is a microcosm of that power arrangement, controls the future of health care reform. And the people in the MSM--the David Broders, the NYT and WaPo elites, the network anchors, the folks at Politico and most at CNN, because, they are not thoughtful, big-picture types, are still in the habit of thinking in Reaganesque terms, and so see the Blue Dogs as most like them, kindred spirits, people who understand how the world works. And they see anybody who does not accept the basic Reaganesque assumptions as left-of-left extremist cranks.
So K Street wins, and the American people lose, and will continue to lose until somebody reverses Reagan the way Reagan reversed FDR. Krugman talks about it today: it's astonishing that Reaganism, considering its failures, has any credibility at all. And it doesn't have any credibility with people who have an ounce of common sense and perceive the world unencumbered by concerns about advancing one's career within the Beltway. But nothing changes until the fundamental culture changes, and that's what Obama said he was going to do--change the culture, change the mindset.
I thought Obama was the man for the job. I really did. During the campaign he gave every indication that he understood what the stakes were and what he had to do. He even compared himself to Reagan in this respect. He knew it wasn't going to be easy, but the fact is that things have aligned perfectly for him to craft such a reversal, if such a reversal is ever to be crafted. The general American public is far more disgusted with Republicans than they were with Democrats when Reagan took the stage. There's a huge window of opportunity, and I thought for sure he'd have the vision and boldness to jump through it. Alas, it would appear Obama is no Reagan, and I don't mean that in a good way.