Jonathan Chait in the New Republic:
There is more at work in the progressive revolt than an irrational attachment to the public plan or an executive distrust of private industry. The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era. The GOP retreat into Palinism represents one half of this collapse. The left’s revolt against health care reform represents the other. What has re-emerged in recent weeks is the spirit of the New Left--distrustful of evolutionary change, compromise between business and labor, and the practical tools of progressive reform. It is the spirit that rejected Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. The New Left rejection of “corporate liberalism” came at what we now regard as the historical apex of American liberalism. At the moment of another historical triumph, liberals are retreating from politics into languor, rage, and other incarnations of anti-politics. One day they may look back upon this time with longing.
Chait sounds so reasonable and grownup, doesn't he? Phrases condemning childish progressives as "New Leftists", "paranoid", as rejecting a spirit of "compromise between business and labor", and "distrustful of evolutionary change". He writes so blithely as if the the postwar New Deal moderate consensus wasn't destroyed by Reaganism. As if, as a result, Labor still has the kind of power that "business" must compromise with. He assumes that the underlying power alignments support things "evolving" rather than devolving for working and middle-income families. Everything is good and getting better according to Jonathan Chait.
This is exactly the mindset that has destroyed the Democrats' credibility with anybody in this country who is appalled by what corporate domination of the American system is doing to us. If corporate liberalism is the future of the Democrats, it's no future at all.
And Chait is right at least in this respect: this may be a time we will look upon with longing--torches and pitchforks are in our future, and it will get ugly. I for one will look back at this time as one when we had a leader and a congress that could have moved things in a more positive evolutionary direction, but instead ratified the country's devolution. But people like Chait will be the last to admit that Dems like him will have had any responsibility in causing the revolt. Entrenched power and its apologists look at everyone who does not benefit from the current power arrangements and complains about it as an extremist.
****
SUNDAY UPDATE: Digby:
The technocrats in Washington see health care reform as a triumph of pragmatic manipulation of the various levers of power. The media is celebrating that Obama Plays by Washington’s Rules. But for a good many people, that very fact violates the central rationale for his presidency. That's what's causing this cognitive dissonance and giving life to a new right wing anti-liberal argument. . . .
The left is already philosophically consistent on the issue of big money in politics, and if they made the case straightforwardly and gained popular support, it could change the way politics are done. The populist right is incoherent. They operate on a whole other set of impulses, which almost always involve scapegoating of the other. I don't see a meaningful alliance there, although I do see how right wing populism will be very useful to the wealthy. It always has been in the past.
I agree that a coalition with the anti-corporate Right is not workable or even desirable. It's more a question who will lead, who will harness this anti-corporate energy and use it to achieve political purposes. We're all in trouble if the Right wins in this competition, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that they are the more likely to do it. That's where the energy and the will to fight is, at least for now.
A Naderite third-party movement is not likely to be effective. It's more a question of who controls the Democratic Party in Washington. Right now the corporate liberals do. So what will it take for progressives to push them aside to change that. It comes down to seats, and it comes down to making corporatism a campaign issue, especially in blue-state Democratic primaries.